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Grand Jury Fails To Indict Officer Over Chokehold Death
Other | Thursday 4th December 2014 | Matt
US Attorney General, Eric Holder, has called for a Civil Rights investigation following the decision last night not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo over the death of 43 year old Eric Garner. This is the second time in just over a week that a jury has dropped all charges against a white officer charged with the unlawful killing of a black man, and protests have erupted across the United States to express solidarity with Garner's family. Holder, in announcing the investigation, has said that "Mr. Garner's death is one of several recent incidents across the country that have tested the sense of trust that must exist between law enforcement and the communities they are charged to serve and protect." You can read the full announcement here.
To say that recent incidents have tested mutual trust between police and communities is a remarkable understatement, and it remains to be seen if the investigation will initiate the wide ranging inter-departmental structural and ideological change that needs to occur in the American police force to restore such trust. Whilst defenders of the Michael Brown verdict were able to at least flimsily suggest the spectre of reasonable doubt thanks to conflicting witness testimony, Eric Garner's death leaves no room for such equivocation. Thanks to video footage of the incident clearly showing Pantaleo applying an illegal chokehold in order to restrain Garner, as the latter begs him to stop, would-be defenders of the ruling are unable this time to offer a single cogent or compelling argument as to why all charges, including manslaughter or culpable homicide, were dropped. In the most clear cut demonstration of systematised racial bias in the American justice system yet, the jury dismissed Pantaleo of any and all culpability in Garner's death, even after the coroner's report cited "compression of neck (chokehold, compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police" as the direct cause of Mr. Garner's demise, and described it as a "homicide". Watch the incident below:
Broadly, politicians from both parties have been united in condemning the verdict and calling for an enquiry, however there remains a contingent of the political right who seem intent on confounding progress on the issue. Republican Congressman Peter King has sparked outrage after claiming that Garner's weight and physical condition are more to blame for his death than Pantaleo's overzealous employment of the banned technique. Unfortunately for those who still like to claim America is a post-racial society, people like King infect the upper echelons of the American political system, and despite the best intentions of the President and his Attorney General, such views are fatally stalling any attempts to address the grievously prejudiced conduct and lack of accountability of police forces across the country.
There is nothing the police force or the judiciary would like more at this present moment than for violent rioting by protestors to distract from its own barbarous incompetence in controling its officers. However these hopes have so far been dashed by the peaceful and enlightened response of demonstrators around the country, and hopefully this atmosphere will continue in the coming weeks. Garner's stepfather, Benjamin Carr, exemplified this spirit of peaceful resistance despite his personal sense of anger and grief. Standing outside the beauty supply store where Garner was killed, Carr expressed his own sense of disillusionment at the ruling: "It ain't worth a damn, there are two sets of laws. It's just a license to kill a black man. Who can control the Police Department? They can shoot me the fuck down and nobody can say anything [...] Imagine if it was your kid? It's just like getting a knife and stabbing my heart. You might as well choke me." As Carr spoke, a man hurled a garbage can at a TV news truck, yet Carr was to take the high ground by calling for peace, saying "I don't want it, and Eric wouldn't want it."
If it so happens that we are confronted by images of violence such as those witnessed in Ferguson last week, it is important to remember that these are isolated expressions of extreme frustration and marginalisation, borne of a decades long campaign of active, state mandated discrimination and repression. We must not mistake such scenes for indiscriminate and arbitrary destruction as the political elite's narrative would have us believe, but realise that they are the result of a fundamental failure in the law to protect the rights of its citizens. America's legitimacy as the moral voice of NATO and the UN has already been called into serious question by these interminable domestic injustices, and the country must act quickly on the issue if it is to salvage its already tattered human rights credentials.
