Sun and highs in the upper 80s today. The heat ramps up tomorrow, with highs in the low 90s and the chance of an afternoon storm.
Defense attorneys for the six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray filed another motion to have State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby removed from the case, pointing to a March 17th email from Mosby’s office asking for police to step up drug enforcement at the corner where Gray first encountered police.
The motion argues that Mosby’s personal pressure on officers to use “enhanced” enforcement methods makes her directly involved in the officers’ actions. The email did not include instructions on how to load a suspect into the back of van without proper restraints, sever a spine, nor tips on how to repeatedly refuse medical attention.
In District Court yesterday, prosecutors dropped the assault and inciting a riot charges against Larry Lomax. Lomax, protesting the city-wide curfew on May 2nd, was pepper-sprayed and thrown to the ground by police, then spent four weeks in jail. Not all the charges were dropped: Lomax is still expected to stand trial next month for disorderly conduct and violating the curfew.
Read of the week: City Paper’s look into the history behind the Department of Education’s ongoing investigation of Johns Hopkins University for Clery Act and Title IX violations. JHU is under scrutiny for not responding well to sexual assaults, especially attacks that happen at off-campus fraternities.
Not a single business has yet received a recovery loan following looting during unrest on April 27th. Only three businesses have gotten emergency grants. While local and federal Small Business Administration officials vowed to make funds available, the process is going slowly (the programs have been slow to move money, and some businesses are struggling with the paperwork, especially if records were lost or destroyed).
George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic will headline a water-themed Artscape next month. The 3-day free festival (July 17-19) will also feature a ‘town hall’ discussion with cast members from The Wire on engaging the city’s youth. There’s more lineup details at the Artscape website.
Ravens’ center and math whiz John Urschel presented at the National Security Agency’s annual Mathfest. In March, Urschel’s peer-reviewed research “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians,” was published in the Journal of Computational Mathematics.