As Porter Trial Heads To Jury, Attorneys Attack Competing Witness TalesSunday, December 13, 2015
Robert Lang and Tyler Waldman, WBAL NewsRadio 1090
The trial of Officer William Porter will head to the jury by the end of the day.
Porter is the first of six Baltimore City police officers to stand trial for the April 19 death of Freddie Gray, who died one week after suffering a broken neck and spinal cord injury after he was arrested and loaded into a police van and taken to the Western District police station. Exactly two weeks after jury selection began, the jury of seven women and five men will retire to the jury deliberation room, likely this afternoon, to decide whether Porter is guilty of any of the four charges against him.
Those charges are involuntary manslaughter, second degree assault, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office.
Before that happens, the jury will hear closing arguments. Assistant State's Attorney Janice Bledsoe delivered the prosecution's closing argument. She began by demonstrating how long it would take to buckle a seatbelt then spent much of her closing discussing the inconsistencies between what Porter told an internal affairs detective in a videotaped interview and what he said in his own testimony, when he took the stand in his own defense. She said internal affairs Det. Syreeta Teel, who testified, took meticulous notes on what Porter said in his interview, and echoed a state's witness when she called prisoner safety "a shared responsibility."
"The van became Freddie Gray's casket on wheels," Bledsoe said, adding that the officer "had an opportunity on four occasions to save Freddie Gray and didn't."
Defense attorney Joseph Murtha said all the prosecution witnesses said something that should cast doubt on the state's theory, and reserved his sharpest criticism for assistant medical examiner Carol Allan, who performed Gray's autopsy and said that her finding of homicide was based on what he characterized as merely theories.
"That alone should raise doubts in the jury," Murtha said.
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