Editorial: Eric Garner decision gross miscarriage of justice
The grand jury’s vote to exonerate the police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner on Staten Island has glaring earmarks of a gross miscarriage of justice.
The ruling is painfully far harder to understand than the Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict for the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.
To a large degree, the evidence against Officer Daniel Pantaleo was widely scrutinized by the public in the form of a on-scene video posted to the Internet by the Daily News. The image of Pantaleo wrestling Garner to the ground with his arm around Garner’s neck was horrifying.
Even granting that a cop has wide latitude in using force to make an arrest, Pantaleo’s sudden aggressiveness was unnecessary. The fact that it entailed a chokehold only reinforced the excessive quality of his actions.
After the medical examiner found that a chokehold and chest compression led to Garner’s death, the connection between cause and effect seemed enough to many people not only to indict but to convict Pantaleo.
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