During Monday evening's edition of The Kelly File on the Fox News Channel, host Megyn Kelly clashed with DeRay Mckesson, an activist with the Black Lives Matter movement, over the decision handed down that morning finding Officer Edward Nero “not guilty” in the death of Freddie Gray.
Mckesson first noted: “What we know to be true is that Freddie Gray should be alive today, and what the judge said today was that Officer Nero was not found criminally responsible.” Kelly later asked her guest: “Don't you see a danger to the community if we start locking up cops for making a bad judgment call?” Before the discussion, the FNC host stated:
When this officer was cleared, not found guilty of anything in the death of Freddie Gray, both the mayor he works for and the bosses he reports to had not a single word of support for Ed Nero, while many of the activists surrounding this case said justice was not done.
Kelly then began the interview by asking Mckesson if he agreed with the opinion that the ruling from Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Barry Williams was “biased and racist to its core” even though “there were zero facts to support this charge against the officer.”
“It's important to note, as you've done so far, that the mayor and the police commissioner have said that they will conduct an investigation,” he noted, “because we know that in the state of Maryland” and the city of Baltimore, current policies “could almost guarantee you that officers will not be held accountable for their actions.”
“What the court found was that there we no facts,” Kelly responded, and “this is a judge who himself had prosecuted cops, bad cops, for the last five years before he took the bench.”
“This is a criminal case, so what the judge found today was that there was no crime committed based on the current laws,” Mckesson stated.
“My question was: Do you accept that?” the host repeated.
“This is a reminder that we need to make the laws so that they can hold police officers accountable,” he replied.
“Like Officer Nero?” Kelly asked. “What did he do that was wrong?”
Mckesson avoided answering the host's question and instead said that with the current standards: “Today was a given. … We have seen this play out in verdicts all across the country.”
“But what specifically did this guy do wrong?” Kelly repeated.
“What the judge stated is that Nero actually did have involvement with the stop but not the arrest specifically,” he responded before asserting:
Freddie Gray should not have been stopped. He was no threat to the officers.
The officers were a threat to Freddie Gray, so remember this is about a range of circumstances today.
Kelly then asked her guest another question: “Don't you see a danger to the community if we start locking up cops for making a bad judgment call?”
“I will never agree that an officer's role is to kill unarmed citizens,” Mckesson stated. “Freddie Gray entered that van alive, He left the van with his spine damaged.”
“So far,” Kelly replied, “the only two groups to weigh in on whether that was the fault of the cops have concluded that this was a mistrial and that the cop was not guilty, so the facts are not coming out to support some sort of intentional harming.”
“We have five more trials,” the BLM activist said. “I hope that you're not suggesting that because there was one acquittal, that means that all of the other cases don't matter.”
“You're suggesting these cops killed this man,” Kelly responded, “and I'm telling you that while Freddie Gray died in police custody, that has not yet been established.”
“The next case that was tried by an African-American judge concluded that there was no case against this officer, and he was just acquitted,” she noted.
“Even though now you have a 'not guilty' verdict against Officer Nero, you continue to tell this audience he did something wrong,” the host then asserted.
Referring to the Black Lives Matter organization, the guest asserted: “In Maryland, in Baltimore city, it is OK for officers to hog-tie and choke-hold citizens. We don't think that is OK.”
“That's a separate thing,” Kelly responded.
Nero “had no responsibility as noted in the judge's decision today to intervene when he saw others misbehaving.” Drawing the interview to a close, Kelly stated: “That's not what the judge concluded. He did not conclude that anybody had misbehaved.”
As Newsbusters previously reported, Associated Press reporter Juliet Linderman demonstrated her liberal bias on Tuesday, when she stated: "Prosecutors failed for the second time in their bid to hold Baltimore police accountable for the arrest and death of Freddie Gray."
