“Adding Insult To Injury”: First Mike Brown, Then Eric Garner; Prosecutors Can’t Be Trusted To Try Cops
A New York City man who was at most guilty of selling loose cigarettes on the street was tackled and placed in a chokehold by a police officer in late August. The man, Eric Garner, protested that he couldn’t breathe, but the officer with his arm around Garner’s didn’t let up. Today, a grand jury announced that it would not indict the officer, Daniel Pantaleo.
The lack of indictment comes just a week after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, did not indict a police officer there, Darren Wilson, for his role in the shooting death of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown. Both Eric Garner and Michael Brown are black and their deaths, within just days of each other in August, helped reignite a national conversation—as well as protests—about disproportionate police violence against the black community. At a time when black men are killed by police with disturbing regularity, Garner and Brown’s deaths added urgency to a long-simmering but woefully unaddressed crisis.
I’ll leave it to the legal analysts to rehash the evidence presented to the Pantaleo grand jury. Hopefully there will be a transparent accounting of what was introduced. But the fact that two grand juries in fairly rapid succession have failed to indict police officers involved in highly questionable deaths of unarmed black men should give us all pause. In Panaleo’s case, the grand jury’s refusal to indict him despite his use of dangerous and violent tactics doesn’t pass the smell test. Add in historic patterns of NYPD abuse against black men in New York—Amadou Diallo, Abner Loiuma, stop and frisk generally—and the lack of an indictment downright stinks.
Combined, the two cases suggest that more should be done to decouple criminal investigations of police abuse from the conventional prosecutorial system. Attorneys who usually work hand-in-hand with the police in pursuing other criminal cases can’t honestly be expected to be impartial and aggressive in then prosecuting those same officers. It’s worth noting that when prosecutors nationwide decide to bring charges before a grand jury, they usually succeed. In 2010, for instance, federal prosecutors sought indictments in about 162,000 cases and in only 11 cases did grand juries not return indictments. In the face of those statistics, these two non-indictments are glaring.
Even worse, the failure to indict the officers who killed both Eric Garner and Michael Brown deprives their communities of the transparency and accountability that trials ensure. No one is saying that the officers should be tried if there’s not sufficient evidence, but many legal analysts have agreed there’s enough in both cases to at least warrant a trial. There are questions about facts in terms of both Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s movements before their death, questions of fact that should be debated in a court. There are questions about the officers’ states of mind—questions that could be fleshed out and better understood if the cases went to trial.
But the lack of indictments, now twice in a row, seems to add insult to injury—that not only are black men routinely, disproportionately victimized by the police but they are victimized by a legal system that refuses to hold the police accountable.
By: Sally Kohn, The Daily Beast, December 3, 2014
“On Trial, In Absentia”: No Presumption Of Innocence For Michael Brown
It’s not clear how effective the instinctive effort to put Michael Brown posthumously on trial for being an African-American teenager who was “no angel” will turn out to be. It was begun, of course, by the Ferguson police as soon as was humanly possible; their “investigation” of the shooting was from the get-go aimed at justifying it as an act of self-defense, much like George Zimmerman’s, by a man being forced to use his deadly force in an encounter with a demonically powerful (if unarmed) black adolescent.
As one might expect, Ta-Nehisi Coates has said pretty much everything that needs saying about the assumption that Michael Brown deserved to die for his sins:
A large number of American teenagers live exactly like Michael Brown. Very few of them are shot in the head and left to bake on the pavement.
But this isn’t just about how the court of public opinion deals with this case. At some point, unless Darren Wilson just skates, it will be litigated in a court of law, presumably before a jury, in which he will formally enjoy the presumption of innocence so many people would apparently deny Brown.
Something about a parallel case from the distant past kept nagging the back of my mind, and sure enough, I found a 1979 Texas Monthly account account by Gary Cartrwright of the acquittal of two Houston cops for killing a black man, thanks to the skill of their attorney, Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, in putting the victim on trial:
[The] two Houston cops…were accused of kicking a black man to death after arresting him for attempting to “steal” his own car. The cops had already been acquitted by a district court in Houston — now they were being tried in federal court on charges that they had violated the man’s civil rights. For starters, Haynes got the trial moved from Houston to the conservative German American town of New Braunfels. “I knew we had that case won when we seated the last bigot on the jury,” Racehorse remarked later. As the trial progressed, Haynes developed these scenarios: (1) that the prisoner suffered severe internal injuries while trying to escape; (2) that he actually died of an overdose of morphine; (3) that the deep laceration in the victim’s liver was the result of a sloppy autopsy.
Sound familiar? Give a sympathetic jury an alternative theory they can seize on, however implausible, and they just might take it–particularly if the defendant is an officer of the law and the victim–who will be described as a victim of his own excesses–fits the jury’s idea of the people cops are hired to keep under control.
Maybe we’ve made some progress since 1979. But I’m not so sure.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 26, 2014
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