NYPD officer in Eric Garner 'chokehold' death not indicted by grand jury

[Michele]

Staten Island was bracing for Ferguson-like trouble Wednesday after a grand jury chose not to indict an NYPD officer for killing Eric Garner with a chokehold, sources said.

There had been warnings earlier that a decision not to charge Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who is white, with a crime for killing a black man, would fan tensions.

And as word of the panel’s decision seeped into the Staten Island neighborhoods where anti-police sentiment is strongest, cops were on high alert and prepared for the worst.

Garner, a 43-year-old father of six, was killed July 17 when Pantaleo subdued him on a Tompkinsville street with a banned chokehold.

Police said they approached Garner because he was selling unlicensed cigarettes - better known as loosies - and that he resisted arrest.

They noted that Garner’s rap sheet listed 31 arrests, beginning when he was 16.

But Garner’s death sparked national outrage after The Daily News obtained a sickening cell phone video of his deadly encounter with police.

Pantaleo, who had been accused of false arrest and violating police procedures in two previous lawsuits, was yanked off the street.


Video and More at Link

[Lanie]

Great. Possibly more riots to come. Can we just have some peace? I'm afraid I don't know enough about this case to form an opinion.

[Michele]

Great. Possibly more riots to come. Can we just have some peace? I'm afraid I don't know enough about this case to form an opinion.

The video is damning for the police officer, imo.

[Adam]

I have not followed this one closely at all. I guess I'll have to look into it.

The fact that he's apparently still facing department disciplinary action suggests to me that this might not have been a good decision, but there' could very well be much more to it than I understand at the moment.

[Norm dePlume]

And where's the liberal media's outrage over lung cancer, huh?

[Lanie]

I have not followed this one closely at all. I guess I'll have to look into it.

The fact that he's apparently still facing department disciplinary action suggests to me that this might not have been a good decision, but there' could very well be much more to it than I understand at the moment.

It looked like he appeared like he wanted to attack, but when they got him, he was begging to let go. He had asthma. I understand asthma.

[Frostbit]

And where's the liberal media's outrage over lung cancer, huh?

..... which is why Americans now favor coffee over tea.

Is this the new Liberal response playbook?

[Adam]

The video is damning for the police officer, imo.

At least what it looks like to me in the video here, the "choke-hold" wasn't a choking maneuver at all, but instead something much more like a half-Nelson, which is used to wrestle him to the ground. Granted, I can't audio here, so I'm going only on somewhat grainy cell phone video I see, but it looks to me like the guy in the green shirt puts his knee on Garner's neck once he's on the ground, which I would strongly suspect as being more likely to have caused the choking death (assuming that asphyxia was indeed the actual cause of death, and I don't know for sure if that's the case or not).

I would say that a half-Nelson is probably far less than ideal police procedure to subdue a suspect for arrest, particularly when you've got four cops there and the suspect is backed up against a wall.

Now, assuming that Pantaleo was the guy in the green shirt (it looks to me like he's the one who did the original "choke-hold," but it's a little tough to be sure in the video), and the grand jury was focused upon the "choke-hold" instead of when the guy was on the ground, then I think someone (presumably the prosecutor) probably screwed that up pretty badly. That's unlikely to sell to a grand jury on Staten Island at any time: these people are all parents of boys who do that same move all the time at high school wrestling matches and practice, and they're not going to associate a much smaller cop putting a half-Nelson on a pretty damn big guy with being responsible for killing the guy.

Of course, all of this hinges upon things like the actual cause of death. Did Garner actually asphyxiate? Did he throw a clot? Have a heart attack? Get his head banged and suffer a subdural hematoma? There are all sorts of reasons why someone can die in a situation like that which have nothing to do with something that the police have done or caused. For example, a significant number of people who die from taser strikes actually die from myocardial infarctions that were brought on by consuming about a pound of angel dust the hour before, thus necessitating the police to use the taser in the first place. That's not something that the police can predict or control.



Gonna have to get more detail on this one.

[Norm dePlume]

Is this the new Liberal response playbook?

The first one was sarcasm, which is nothing new. You've done that one yourself.

The second was irony and a sly historical reference. Also nothing new.

Maybe we could work out some sort of annotation so you wouldn't have to think too hard about these things. That last sentence was condescension. And so was that one.

[Adam]

Officer Daniel Pantaleo Told Grand Jury He Meant No Harm to Eric Garner

It was never supposed to be a chokehold, the officer testified. It was a wrestling move.

[....]

The officer tackled some of the most damaging evidence head-on. He acknowledged that he heard Mr. Garner saying, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” and insisted that he tried to disengage as quickly as he could, according to his lawyer, Stuart London. At the same time, Mr. Garner’s ability to speak, the officer testified, suggested that he, in fact, could breathe.

[....]

Officer Pantaleo testified that when he put his hands on Mr. Garner, he was employing a maneuver taught to him at the Police Academy, hooking an arm underneath one of Mr. Garner’s arms while wrapping the other around Mr. Garner’s torso, Mr. London said. The move is meant to “tip the person so they lose their balance and go to the ground,” as seen in wrestling, Mr. London said.

So what he was attempting to do was in fact basically a half-Nelson. Garner thrashed around to the point that Pantaleo ultimately wound up just basically with his arm around Garner's neck. Looking at this video, which is at a different angle, it's a clearer view of Pantaleo the whole time. I'm counting a little less than ten seconds that he had his hands on Garner at all, and at least the first few seconds, there was no choking going on at all: he starts out when his right arm looped under Garner's right armpit and his left hand at Garner's chin, clearly not choking him. Honestly, I can't say that at any time, Pantaleo's actions actually choked Garner, in the sense of depriving him of oxygen. I'm having a very hard time believing that a few seconds of someone maybe getting deprived of oxygen is going to be a straight-line cause of death, at least not in a case that anyone could reasonably predict. The article notes that "the autopsy determined the victim’s asthma, obesity and high blood pressure were also contributing factors in his death." I was hoping to find the autopsy report itself, or at least a more detailed article on it, but I haven't found it yet. However, according to what I heard on the radio this morning, the autopsy gives a whole laundry list of contributing factors in Eric Garner's death.

Frankly, if I were on that grand jury, given the evidence I've seen so far, I don't think I would have voted to indict, either. Particularly in Pantaleo's case, it does not appear that he is the one who caused the death. It's possible that some of the other cops there did, but I'm not really seeing it in Pantaleo's case.

[Adam]

NOW we're getting somewhere:

The forbidden chokehold used by a cop to take down a Staten Island man in a deadly encounter Thursday did not damage his windpipe or neck bones, sources said.

The preliminary autopsy findings could be welcome news for Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo, now named as the cop who wrapped his arm around Eric Garner’s throat while trying to *arrest him.

“If you’re the defense counsel in this case, this is very good news, because it’s consistent with what appears to be the case — that they didn’t mean to hurt him,” said John Jay College of Criminal Justice Professor Eugene O’Donnell.

But a source close to the Medical Examiner’s investigation said coroners are also investigating whether the chokehold still contributed to Garner’s death by aggravating his pre-existing conditions of obesity, asthma and possible heart disease. He died of cardiac arrest in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

So they're basically playing "seven degrees of separation" between this supposed "choke-hold" and the death itself. There's a bunch of woulda-coulda-maybe in this whole mess. The guy was morbidly obese, he had heart disease, high blood pressure, and asthma, at the very least. I'd just about be willing to bet that he was diabetic or pre-diabetic, as well. This guy was a walking coronary already. Trying to draw a straight line from this "choke-hold" to the death is basically impossible.

This is looking more and more like something completely manufactured of whole cloth by Tawana Sharpton. Everyone act surprised.

[Norm dePlume]

At least what it looks like to me in the video here, the "choke-hold" wasn't a choking maneuver at all, but instead something much more like a half-Nelson, which is used to wrestle him to the ground.

Let's just call it a forearm-to-larynx hug.

[phillygirl]

The shame of all of this is that he was being arrested for selling untaxed cigarettes.

[Norm dePlume]

The shame of all of this is that he was being arrested for selling untaxed cigarettes.

So it's a taxation thing. I guess we can expect the Tea Party to take up the cause on this one.

[phillygirl]

So it's a taxation thing. I guess we can expect the Tea Party to take up the cause on this one.

For me, it's an issue of a minor, non-violent crime, and he died because of it. That's not to say that the officer did anything criminal, but I find it to be a shame that the man's crime was one of simple not paying the state their due. Such a shame.