By Baynard Woods for The Real News Network - A Baltimore jury convicted Keith Davis Jr. for the murder of Kevin Jones on Tuesday evening, after only a couple hours of deliberation in a case full of police irregularities. Davis, a focal point of the city’s activist community, was the first person to be shot by Baltimore Police in June 2015, following the in-custody death of Freddie Gray that rocked the city with protests. Davis was initially acquitted of all but one of the charges against him—but that one charge, police said, tied him to Jones’ murder. Police claimed that Davis hijacked an unlicensed cab, driven by a man named Charles Holden, who then pulled up beside a police car, causing the gunman to flee. Two officers chased the man who fled the car on foot and eventually cornered Davis in a garage, where they, and other officers who had since arrived on the scene, fired more than 40 shots at him. At the time, they claimed that Davis fired at them, a claim later retracted. When Davis, who was on his cellphone with his fiancée Kelly Holsey throughout the ordeal, was hit by three bullets he fell to the ground. Police later claimed that they found a gun and Davis’ wallet on top of a refrigerator inside the garage. The police story did not stand up. “To my recollection that don’t look like him to me,” Holden, the primary witness, said in court. Another witness, Martina Washington, who was in the garage when Davis ran in, testified that police had influenced her description of the man who entered the garage.
