The office of Baltimore city state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby claims the 35-year-old prosecutor’s public May 1 announcement of the six cops charged in the Freddie Gray case saved Baltimore “before the entire city became an armed camp or was burned to the ground.”
“Mrs. Mosby was trying to calm the crowd, not incite it,” Mosby’s deputy Michael Schatzow wrote a motion filed on Wednesday, according to The Baltimore Sun. Mosby’s announcement came days after rioters and looters destroyed more than 200 businesses in the city.
Schatzow’s motion was in response to one filed by the officers’ attorneys. They asked a judge for charges to be dropped, claiming that Mosby’s public announcement tainted a potential jury pool.
“Her repeated pleas for peace while the criminal justice system does its work served a legitimate law enforcement function,” Schatzow said in his motion.
“To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America: I heard your call for ‘No justice, no peace,'” Mosby said during her widely-watched press conference. “Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man.”
While Mosby’s office is taking credit for the rookie prosecutor helping prevent more rioting, Mosby herself has said that her charging decision had nothing to do with violence gripping the city at the time.
“The unrest had nothing to do with my decision to charge,” Mosby told Vogue for a profile published this week.
“I just followed where the facts led. This is not something that was fast, or in a hurry. From the time that this incident occurred, we were out there conducting our own investigation and working with the police department. There is nothing that we’ve done differently in this case.”