AFTER LOSING HIS 1983 MAYORAL campaign, Billy resigned his circuit court judgeship in order to stand on the other side of the bench and represent clients. That’s where the money was. And that’s where he thought he’d be able to make the sort of impact he was hungry for. Within three years, he was the top lawyer in the city, taking big criminal cases that mattered. Cases that made the papers. Cases the city paid attention to, and paid money to make go away. For the next three decades Billy was one of the most visible legal figures in Baltimore and made millions of dollars, building one of the top legal firms in the country, Murphy, Falcon, and Murphy. The firm focused on multiple aspects of law—criminal cases, civil litigation, athlete representation—but he also took on some of the highest-profile cases involving police brutality, including the case that helped put him on the map, that of Albert Mosley.
On June 25, 2003, Albert Mosley, a middle-aged African American man on probation, was out drinking. On his way home he was stopped by police, who arrested him for public drunkenness and brought him to the Western District police station. While in the station, he apparently became unruly and got into a shouting match with officers. While Mosley was still handcuffed, the officers slammed him into a cement wall, and, unable to break his own fall, he landed face-first on the cement floor. He lay there bleeding and unable to move for forty-five minutes until finally he was given medical attention and taken to the hospital. As a result of his injuries Mosley was paralyzed from the waist down and barely able to move his arms. Billy became his counsel, and after a contentious and public battle that lasted two years, the City was found culpable and Albert Mosley received a $44 million payment, at the time the largest payout in a police brutality case in Baltimore history. When he was interviewed right after the verdict, Mosley said, “I didn’t believe there was justice in the world until yesterday. I’ve finally seen justice and I thank God for my attorney Billy Murphy. I am indebted to him for the rest of my life.”
This case made Billy the first stop for people who had complaints against the police department. Billy built an entire lane of his business on this premise, and Baltimore provided a pipeline of cases that kept his firm busy.
Billy realized soon after agreeing to represent Freddie’s family that this case was going to be different. When he first saw Freddie at the hospital, he had been in a coma for four days, kept alive only by a respirator. Repeatedly shaking his head as he looked at the fragile man in the hospital bed, Billy asked himself the question the community was asking: How had Freddie come to be lying there with an almost fully severed spine, when just days ago he’d been perfectly fine?
Even after the video of the screaming man went viral, it seemed that no city leader was concerned with finding out. Soon after taking the case, Billy picked up his phone and called the mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. He assumed she knew about the case already, and he just wanted Baltimore’s chief executive to know about the storm that was headed her way. When Billy had the mayor on the phone, he said, “Hey, Madam Mayor, we need to talk about my new client, Freddie Gray.” There was a pause on the other end of the phone before the mayor’s answer: “Who’s that?”
Billy shuttled between the hospital and the neighborhood where Freddie had taken his final steps, trying to get details. Billy understood that what made this case different was not just the fact that it involved police—that wasn’t new either to Billy or to the community—but how willing people were to talk. Usually people don’t want to talk, particularly in cases involving violence, for fear of retribution, worried that they might be putting themselves or their family in harm’s way by cooperating. Billy was used to the blank stares people would give to him when he would ask if they’d seen anything regarding a case he was working on. But Billy was startled by how different things were with this case. Older women came up to him, almost cheering him on: “Get ’em, Billy.” He was approached by young mothers in nurses’ uniforms returning from work. Young men with gold-fronted teeth. Grandparents dressed up walking with their grandchildren dressed down. Pulling his arm, wanting to show him exactly where things had happened. Billy took notes, hurriedly moving his pen across the page.
Billy knew about Freddie’s rap sheet. Between 2007 and 2015, Freddie Gray had been arrested seventeen times. Charged with crimes ranging from illegal gambling, trespassing, and possession of marijuana to malicious destruction of property and fourth-degree burglary, Freddie was a very familiar figure to the police in the neighborhood. But that wasn’t the Freddie the neighborhood was describing to Billy. Outrage and heartache poured from the lips of the West Baltimore residents that Billy interviewed. Freddie had been the kid that everyone in the neighborhood knew and liked. “Not that kid.” “Not Freddie.” “Freddie never bothered anybody.” “Freddie always has nice things to say.” “Freddie just goes ’bout his business.” “Why him?” Unlike other cases in which Billy struggled to get any piece of information, in Freddie’s case the streets were talking. And the streets wanted justice.