coming up at 7:00 eastern, my colleague don lemon continues our special coverage from baltimore. before that smerconish begins right now. i m michael smerconish. welcome to the program. i m in baltimore where, for the first time in weeks, people in this city are celebrating, saying justice has been served after the surprise announcement from the state attorney, that six officers have been charged in the death of 25-year-old freddie gray. it s been nearly three weeks since gray was tossed in the back of a police van, and that s where the state prosecutor says he suffered those fatal injuries. investigators deemed his arrest illegal and his death a homicide. four of the six officers are charged with manslaughter among other charges, but the driver of the police van faces the most serious charge, second degree murder. joining me now is baltimore sun reporter justin fenton.
if mayweather gets past pacquiao, will the people finally get to see mayweather v. merchant? it s been talked about. we know that it took a long time to make mayweather and pacquiao. it may take as long or longer to make mayweather and merchant. were you surprised by the life that tht took on of its own? i mean, people were making t-shirts. it s been viewed, larry, more than a million times on youtube. and a grandson of mine told me i was trending past justin bieber. i thought it was a momentary thing, something that would have a very short life. but wherever i go people throw that line back at me, and we all get a smile out of it. it will be no lower than the second paragraph of my obituary. hopefully that will be 100 years from now.
have been bustling, and then it hit me the ripple effect on businesses in this community has been enormous. yeah. we opened a casino in the fall, a 24-hour casino. it closed for first time once this curfew started. there s a very popular bar in fells point neighborhood who said their business is down 95%. what a shame. all throughout the city people are very upset about the curfew and questioning whether it s necessary. justin, thank you so much. great job on the reporting and great job by the sun. let me bring in cnn legal analyst and criminal defense attorney mark o mara. mark, how would you defend these cops if you were asked to do so? well, with the premise that it s like planning a surgery when you don t have the blood tests or the x-rays. one thing we re going to look at is to say that these cops were simply doing their job, may not have done it very well, but they were doing their job. and as you mentioned a moment ago, what they re being charged with is not doing so
the power to charge. there are six officers who are currently suspended. can you walk me through the process? she has all this information from the police department. obviously this is the police department s findings of its own officers. how does she keep that objectivity in looking into all of this? you know there are always questions about whether state prosecutors can be objective in these cases because frankly, they work with police officers every day. so it s not so much that they re biased but they might give people the benefit of the doubt. this is a prosecutor who s the youngest head prosecutor in the country. both of her parents are police officers. she was endorsed by the police union. i think there are absolutely going to be questions about whether she s objective. also, and evan, i m coming to you in a second with what you have on the van stop. finally for you, justin just
peaceful and to trust the process of the justice system. let s discuss all of this. georgetown law professor and former prosecutor paul butler is with me. baltimore sun reporter justin fenton is here with me. i also have our justice correspondent evan perez. we think it s important let s go with the fact that we now have one day early this report from the police investigation is now in the hands of the state attorney who s the city prosecutor. why do you think it happened a day early? there was a lot of expectation about this report that they were going to deliver findings to the public. that obviously didn t happen. so i think that they wanted to deliver it a day early as a show of good faith, that they were working as fast as they could. they had exhausted all their leads and it was time to turn it over to the prosecutor who is ultimately the one who will decide whether there are charges filed. paul, now that this sits in marilyn moseby s hands, she has