Stronger Mosby Disbarment Complaint Filed - "Bald-Faced Self Serving Lies"

WASHINGTON - Aug. 9, 2016 - PRLog -- A second formal legal complaint, providing even stronger evidence for the requested disbarment of  Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby, has been filed with the Attorney Grievance Commission of Maryland, even as its Bar Counsel continues investigating the two complaints against her which have already been filed, announces public interest law professor John Banzhaf.

        This new complaint adds to the former counts - of violating the constitutional rights of the  defendant police officers (based upon the trial judge's own ruling), and of being a "runaway" prosecutor like former Duke lacrosse-player rape-prosecutor Mike Nifong - several different counts of deliberately lying to the public about why the cases against the remaining officers were dropped.

        The Maryland Lawyer's Rules of Professional Conduct [MPC] make it a disbarable offense for an attorney representing a client to "make a false statement of material fact or law to a third person" [Rule 4.1] or to "engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation" [Rule 8.4(c)].

        This second complaint alleges that Mosby violated these two rules, and possibly also Rule 8.4(d) which prohibits engaging "in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice," when she falsely accused her opponents of backdating critical notes related to obtaining the indictments, and of "creating" videotapes to undermine her case.  The complaint calls both statements "bald-faced self-serving lies."

        Although Mosby claimed in a public statement that she had decided to drop the prosecution of the remaining officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray because she had finally reached the conclusion that she was unlikely to break her unbroken string of losses, it now appears that the real reason was that the two lawyers assigned to prosecute the remaining cases refused for ethical reasons to proceed.

        More specifically, career prosecutor Lisa Phelps abruptly resigned, reportedly because she felt very strongly that the prosecutions were so unethical that she had to quit rather than proceed.  Days later, the second prosecutor, Lisa David, also quit, saying on the record that her reasons for quitting were the same.

        "It took a hell of a lot of guts to sacrifice one's job after 15 years of service and only 5 years away from a possible pension," said a career prosecutor in the same office who knew Phelps well, saying that Phelps was a "lifer" who wanted to continue prosecuting criminals until she retired or died.

        Although Chief Deputy State's Attorney Michael Schatzow tried to analogize the issue to a routine one where prosecutors "they question the witness, they question the legal theory," etc., this is clearly something much more; something so horribly wrong about the prosecution that prosecutors would not only give up good jobs, but also speak publicly about why they were compelled to do so, suggests Banzhaf.

        The refusal of these two attorneys to prosecute the remaining cases, in defiance of Mosby's directions, was probably what actually forced her to finally give up, not a sudden realization after the fourth loss - but, strangely not after the second, or third - they she was very unlikely to win.

        For legal reasons, two new prosecutors had to be assigned to prosecute the cases, so that the other trial attorneys, who may not have had the same ethical qualms, could no longer continue to do so.

        In attempting to charge many of the police for the failure of her four prosecutions, Mosby blamed them for, among other things, "creating notes, that were drafted AFTER the case was launched, to contradict the medical examiner's conclusions." [emphasis added]

        But, says this second stronger complaint, this statement is a lie.

        The proof is that the note in question was drafted at the same time as a very similar text message, and that the latter was time stamped - thereby providing almost irrefutable proof that the note and text were not created "after" the case was launched, as Mosby had falsely claimed.

        Similarly, Mosby charged some police with "creating videos to disprove the state's case without our knowledge."

        In other words, she accused police of deliberately manufacturing and/or altering video tapes to make them false or at least fraudulent and misleading - an action which, if true, would constitute a felony.

        Yet, to the contrary, as this supplemental complaint charges: "Complainant is unaware of any evidence - or even any other statements to that effect by any other person - that misleading video tapes were produced by any person for any purpose regarding this matter, much less that they were produced ["created"] to disprove the state's case.

        Banzhaf also helped put an end to prosecutorial overreaching and other abuses by former North Carolina prosecutor Mike Nifong, who was eventually disbarred and driven into bankruptcy.

        He is widely known for many other public interest legal actions including those related to smoking, environmental protection, discrimination, governmental wrongdoing, etc.

JOHN F. BANZHAF III, B.S.E.E., J.D., Sc.D.
Professor of Public Interest Law
George Washington University Law School,
FAMRI Dr. William Cahan Distinguished Professor,
Fellow, World Technology Network,
Founder, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)
2000 H Street, NW, Wash, DC 20052, USA
(202) 994-7229 // (703) 527-8418
http://banzhaf.net/  jbanzhaf@law.gwu.edu  @profbanzhaf