A man who videotaped a controversial arrest by Baltimore police is facing a retrial on drug charges today.
Fred Curry, whose videotape of a police officer throwing Curry?s handcuffed uncle, Wayne Curry, to the ground made headlines last August, will again face drug charges his attorney said are retaliation for his involvement in making the tape that embarrassed the department.
“Clearly they want to get him out of the way; he?s the sole witness in Wayne Curry?s case,” said Granville Templeton, Fred Curry?s attorney.
A two-day trial in May ended in a hung jury, after several witnesses contradicted police testimony that Curry was dealing drugs.
“They asked him what his name is, and then they handcuffed him and said, ?We?ll do you like you did us,?” testified Sheldon Richburg, a witness at Fred Curry?s first trial.
But police, who did not discover drugs on Curry, testified they observed Curry holding a plastic bag in his hands they believed contained drugs. Later, police located a stash of roughly 50 vials of crack under a stoop half a block away from where Curry was sitting.
Prosecutors did not return phone calls seeking comments on the case.
Last August, a videotape surfaced made by Fred Curry showing his handcuffed uncle being struck and then thrown to the ground by a police officer during an arrest in west Baltimore. Fred Curry was charged with drug possession, but the charges were dropped.
An internal investigation of the arrest by police concluded the officer had acted properly.
Templeton also represents Fenyanga Muhammed, a West Baltimore man shot four times by police in February. Muhammed says police mistook a Popsicle stick in his mouth for drugs, a story recently corroborated by a photograph taken by police just after he was shot showing a Popsicle stick lying on the ground.
Curry, who is employed by the city Department of Transportation, is being held on $250,000 bail, although he has only one minor conviction on his record, when he was 18.
“His employers testified at the trial that they believe he is innocent, and they are holding his job for him,” Templeton said, citing testimony from supervisors that Curry was working on the day police allege he was dealing drugs. “He just wants to go home.”
