[CNN] Shortly after being elected last year, Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby said prosecutors in her troubled city had the "toughest job in America."It's not getting any easier.
After three police officers were acquitted in recent months of charges related to last year's high-profile death of Freddie Gray, prosecutors announced Wednesday they were dropping all charges against the three remaining officers facing trial in connection with Gray's death.
The news was a defeat for Mosby, who had announced the charges against the six officers in May 2015 -- four months after she took the job as the city's top prosecutor. At the time, she drew praise from some who admired how swiftly she took on the case, and criticism from others who said there wasn't enough evidence to convict the officers.
"To the people of Baltimore and demonstrators across America, I heard your call for 'No Justice, No peace,'" she said last year. "Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man."
But on Wednesday Mosby said she had no choice but to drop the charges -- ending a 15-month legal saga that strained relations between her office and the city's police department.
'Dismal likelihood of conviction'
Still, Mosby struck a defiant tone. Standing at the intersection where police arrested Gray in April 2015 -- and with Freddie Gray's stepfather Richard Shipley at her side -- she railed against police officers whom she accused of kneecapping her office's investigation.
Police investigating police is "problematic," she said, citing "the obvious bias consistently exemplified" by some officers throughout the case. Officers who were witnesses were placed on the investigation team, lead detectives were uncooperative, the department launched a "counter-investigation" to disprove her case and officers created notes after the case was launched and gave them to the defense months before they were provided to the state, she alleged.
Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police President Gene Ryan called Mosby's accusations "outrageous" and "simply not true." Ivan Bates, an attorney for Sgt. Alicia White -- one of the six accused officers -- appeared at police union headquarters with his client and the other five officers and said it was Mosby's office that had denied the Gray family justice.
Given the near-certainty that the remaining officers would skip a jury trial and instead elect to be tried in a bench trial before Judge Barry Williams, who had already vindicated two of the officers, and given the "dismal likelihood of conviction," Mosby said she had no choice but to relent.