Defense provides evidence for claim of 'judge-shopping' in Freddie Gray case
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[QUOTE]Attorneys for the six Baltimore police officers charged in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray presented new evidence Wednesday to support their claims that a prosecutor went "shopping" for a judge to sign warrants for the officers' department-issued cellphones.
The evidence in their motion included text messages between the prosecutor and a police detective investigating the case.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, responded to claims by some of the officers that they had made statements to detectives under duress.
"Simply put," they wrote in a motion of their own, "no one ordered, compelled, coerced, or otherwise required the Defendants to make their statements. They gave them voluntarily."
Defense attorneys repeated their assertion that a prosecutor — identified for the first time as Assistant State's Attorney Albert Peisinger — communicated improperly with a Circuit Court judge to get the warrants signed after the first judge he tried found that they lacked probable cause.
Defense attorneys say they also discovered an unexecuted warrant for the officers' private cellphones that was never disclosed to them in discovery, and another warrant — for the same personal phones — that was denied.
The defense filing is a response to a motion filed last week by the office of Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby in which prosecutors called the judge-shopping claim a "falsehood" and suggested it would ask the court to sanction the attorneys who brought it.
The defense attorneys say it's the prosecutors who deserve to be sanctioned.
"The State seeks to mask their own misconduct with rhetoric," they wrote.[/QUOTE]
TL;DR: Prosecution got a warrant for phone records denied by a judge, so they went to another judge to get the warrant.
[URL="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/freddie-gray/bs-md-ci-freddie-gray-filings-20150729-story.html#page=1"]Source[/URL]
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