BALTIMORE — A police officer was acquitted of all charges Monday in the arrest of Freddie Gray, a black man who suffered a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody. The verdict is likely to renew debate over whether anyone will be held responsible for Gray’s death.
The officer, Edward M. Nero, sat with a straight back and stared forward as Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams, who ruled on the case after the officer opted to forgo a jury trial, read his verdict on the charges of second-degree assault, misconduct and reckless endangerment.
“The verdict on each count,’’ said Williams, concluding his reading after about 30 minutes, “is not guilty.’’
“The state’s theory has been one of recklessness and negligence,’’ Williams said. “There has been no evidence that the defendant intended for a crime to occur.’’
Nero, who was implicated not in the death of Gray but in the opening moments of his arrest, then stood and hugged his lawyers as supporters pressed forward to congratulate him. He wiped away tears and, at one point, embraced Officer Garrett E. Miller, who is also charged in connection with the arrest of Gray
About a dozen protesters gathered outside the courthouse in the moments after the verdict was rendered, and some chanted the familiar protest cry, “No justice, no peace.’’
“To see that officer walk away, and still no accountability, that hurts me the most,’’ said the Rev. Westley West, a frequent presence at demonstrations related to Gray’s death. “That could be me.’’
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake pleaded for calm, noting that Nero still faces a departmental review and could face disciplinary action. ‘‘We once again ask the citizens to be patient and to allow the entire process to come to a conclusion,’’ she said.
The verdict, the first in any of the six officers implicated, comes a little more than a year after Gray died in April 2015.
The first trial, against Officer William G. Porter, ended with a mistrial in December. Gray’s death embroiled parts of Baltimore, which has a history of tension between the police and its residents, in violent protest and became an inexorable piece of the nation’s wrenching discussion of the use of force by officers, particularly against minorities.
Many demonstrators had felt vindicated last year when the city’s top prosecutor, Marilyn J. Mosby, announced charges against the officers, but legal specialists have questioned whether they were too ambitious.
Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said that Mosby had “overplayed her hand.’’
Charges were filed too quickly, he said, adding that prosecutors should have spent more time bolstering cases against one or two officers who may have been most culpable. “Someone dying doesn’t always make it a crime,’’ Moskos said. “The prosecutors are trying to find social justice, but these are trials of individual cops.’’
A lawyer for Nero, Marc Zayon, called for the charges against the remaining officers to be dropped.
“The state’s attorney for Baltimore City rushed to charge him, as well as the other five officers, completely disregarding the facts of the case and the applicable law,’’ Zayon said in a statement.
“Like Officer Nero,’’ Zayon added, “these officers have done nothing wrong.’’
The Police Department said Monday that the internal review of Nero, 30, who remains on administrative leave, will not be resolved until after the trials of the other officers involved.
The trial had shifted the focus from the injuries that killed Gray, which was a crucial point in Porter’s trial, to the opening moments of his arrest.
It was never going to be the highest-profile prosecution in the case related to Gray; that will be Caesar R. Goodson Jr., the driver of the police wagon in which Gray is believed to have broken his neck.
But, in a city that is already the subject of a federal civil rights investigation into whether officers use excessive force and discriminatory policing, Nero’s trial renewed questions about when an officer can stop a citizen and what an officer is allowed to do.
“I would say the trial has engendered a wider conversation about how police operate in poor communities, particularly poor communities of color that raises critical issues about society,’’ said David Jaros, a law professor at the University of Baltimore.
Williams focused his rulings on Nero’s specific actions, Jaros said, rather than commenting on the broad legal theory underpinning the prosecution’s case. Some legal analysts said the ruling was so narrowly tailored that it provides little insight to what could happen in the upcoming trials.
Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, called the charges an unusual attempt by a prosecutor to convict a police officer for making an arrest that lacked probable cause.
Despite the acquittal, Tessa Hill-Aston, president of the Baltimore city branch of the NAACP, said she remained hopeful that someone would eventually be held responsible for Gray’s death. “I’m thankful we’re even in court, that charges were brought,’’ she said. “But now we’ve got to come out with something.’’
A lawyer for the Gray family, William H. Murphy Jr., called Williams’ ruling an “excellent opinion.’’
Murphy added: “The family doesn’t want to see a conviction or an acquittal. They want to see justice. So they’re not going to be frustrated regardless of how this turns out, and neither should the community.’’
Baltimore reached a $6.4 million settlement with Gray’s family in September.
