Officers file motions to dismiss case in black man's death

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Officers file motions to dismiss case in black man's death

Updated 5:50 pm, Tuesday, June 28, 2016

BALTIMORE (AP) — Three officers poised to stand trial in the case of a 25-year-old black man who died after his neck was broken in police custody are asking for their cases to be dismissed.

Sgt. Alicia White and Officer Garrett Miller filed motions to dismiss their cases on Monday, citing defects in the prosecution's case. The Baltimore Sun reported Tuesday that Lt. Brian Rice had also filed a similar motion, but that motion was not publicly available. Rice is the highest-ranking officer charged in the case. He also is asking prosecutors to disclose grand jury minutes and testimony.

The officers are each facing identical charges of manslaughter, assault, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office in the case of Freddie Gray, who died on April 19, 2015, a week after suffering a critical spinal injury in the back of a police transport wagon. Gray's death last year sparked protests and civil unrest that resulted in looting, rioting and millions of dollars in property damage.

Two other officers charged in the case, including Caesar Goodson, the wagon driver who faced a second-degree murder charge, have been acquitted in the past month. The trial for a third officer, William Porter, ended in a mistrial in December. He's schedule for retrial in September.

Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Officer-files-motion-to-dismiss-case-in-black-8330066.php

[MadLinguist]

1. Jesus, AP! The man's name was Freddie Gray!

The aggressors all get individuated and named and humanized, while the victim is "black man's death", in the AP article's title.
This is yet another manifestation of the same ugly shit that killed Freddie Gray.

[metalbot]

2. I think you're reading too much into this

They clearly say it's about Freddie Gray in the article. The essence of the problem being articulated after he was killed isn't that Freddie Gray was killed, but that there's a systematic pattern of violence against minorities. If they'd simply used Freddie Gray's name and not mentioned the racial context, we'd be arguing about "The AP won't even talk about the underlying systematic problem" - maybe not with you, but some other poster would be pointing that out.

[Igel]

3. One important thing in formal linguistics is to notice asymmetries.

"The victim gets individuated and named and humanized, while the accused are "officers", in the AP article's title."

Is this a true statement?

Yes. Also, note that headlines are typically cataphoric, esp. in follow-up stories. You're objecting to cataphora in the case of Gray, but not the officers.

All the rest of what I'd say follows from pursuing the asymmetry, and figuring out why the information structure of the article is as it really should be. Now, if you want the article to have a different purpose, perhaps that's a problem and be reflected not just in the information structure expected but also the semantic representation of the name. That, too, would produce asymmetries in production.

Old information media focuses on news. New information goes first. The event here is the filing, and for that you have a two-place predicate. Gray's not one of them. Somewhere down in spec of CP of a complement to the complement to a predicate you get Gray. His death is old news. It shows up just to specify the topic in detail; it has no status as comment.

For me, "Freddie Gray" as a semantic representation along the lines of "the black man who died in police custody last year in Baltimore and whose death made the national news." That's it. Not very emotional, no strong connotations, and not very personal. I know nothing else about him and, to be frank, have no more interest in him than in 7 billion other people. For many, somehow the idea he's a symbol of police injustice or racial injustice that the speaker identifies with personally gets worked in there (the "say your name" motif is built on that). It's a symbol different from the usual sound/referent symbolic representation. In some ways, he's more iconic than indexical, and in some ways more complex. But it's in no way more humanizing; if anything, to a great extent it fends of humanizing. Michael Brown was humanized despite all attempts, and couldn't be a good symbol--too much baggage, too many flaws, and his positive traits ("going to college&quot turned to lead. Good symbols mustn't have serious flaws that can't be explained away.

For me, demoting Gray to background information in a story featuring new content is expected; he's not central, and, in fact, if he were never named at all there'd be no great gap in the information--heck, naming the three officers does nothing for me, but they're strongly implicated so they have greater justification for being named. But if your semantic representation of Gray's name is different, then that's going to be exposed in an asymmetrical reaction to the normative discourse structure and use of anaphoric relations in writing the headline. It's okay to demote the three humans to "officers", but not okay to demote another human to "black man" because that dehumanizes him. The article has to be about Gray.

And we're back to asymmetries, because some things can be discussed explicitly and other things must not be.