Too often, we see district attorneys side with law enforcement officials when it comes to seeking justice. Unless that district attorney is Marilyn Mosby.
Mosby shot to instant recognition last May when she announced that she would be seeking prosecution against the six Baltimore police officers who were involved in Freddie Gray’s death. She stopped by NewsOne Now, where she said that her purpose for becoming a prosecutor was achieving justice.
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“That means pursuing justice on behalf of victims and witnesses and crimes—justice on behalf of defendants—and we can see that prosecutorial discretion has as lot of consequences, collateral consequences on our community,” she said. “It’s about applying justice fairly and equally, regardless of sex, occupation, your religion, and that is something that I take very seriously.”
She said that though it wasn’t the “popular opinion” among Baltimore law enforcement officials, she opted to prosecute the six officers because she wants to make sure that people are held accountable for their actions if they break the law.
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She went on to call for diversity in the law enforcement sector, saying that as a Black woman, she represents a dismal 1 percent of the nation’s elected prosecutors.
“These are the individuals that are making a decision about who is going to be charged, what they are going to be charged with, what sentence recommendation they are going to make,” she said. “We need more of us on both sides of the fence, and I have to say that we have to utilize that discretion in ways that we can consider recidivism, and we can consider the young people and have an alternative to incarceration.”