“Everybody Just Loves Danny”: Meet Dan Donovan, The Prosecutor Who Let Eric Garner’s Killer Walk
New York City has one mayor, two other citywide elected officials, 10 borough-wide elected officials, 51 City Council members, several dozen state lawmakers, and a dozen members of Congress representing its 8 million people.
And nearly all have been mugging for the cameras in the hours after a grand jury declined to indict New York City Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the strangulation of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who attracted police attention for selling single cigarettes.
All that is, except for Dan Donovan, the Staten Island district attorney who failed to win the indictment, and failed too to use the opportunity to get his face before the television cameras. Donovan, a four-term DA, is in many ways the anti-Bob McCulloch, the Ferguson, Missouri, district attorney, who used a similar moment to launch a prime-time diatribe against the media, social or otherwise.
Even those who have been leading protests against the verdict have praised Donovan.
“Personally, Dan Donovan and I are friends. I try to separate the job that he has done and our friendship,” said Debi Rose, a liberal city council member from Staten Island’s urban north shore. “In this particular instance, I find that because of the DA’s relationship with the police department, that outcome wasn’t surprising.”
To understand Donovan, and to understand how the Garner grand jury could reach the verdict, it is first necessary to understand something about Staten Island. Officially a borough of New York City, although it wants to deny it, Staten Island voted Republican in the 2013 mayor’s race, though Democrat Bill de Blasio won citywide by nearly 50 points. It is a place where its lone congressional representative, Michael Grimm, faces a 20-count indictment, threatened to throw a television reporter off a balcony, and still won re-election by ever larger numbers.
Donovan’s father was a longshoreman who struggled with alcoholism, and Donovan came up under the protection of the Island’s Republican machine. A one-time close friend of the now-disgraced former Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, he was hired by longtime Island powerbroker and Borough President Guy Molinari to serve as his chief of staff, and when Molinari retired, handing the reins of the Island to protégé Jim Molinaro, Donovan stayed on, using the post to run for district attorney.
He had never prosecuted a case, and was not, he liked to say, a legal scholar, but Donovan has proved to be a natural politician in the mold of the backslapping Irish pols of yore, easily winning re-election on Staten Island. The most controversy he has gotten into his tenure came when he recused himself from a case involving Molinaro’s grandson, a teenager who violated his probation. Molinaro was furious, taking out a full-page ad in the Staten Island Advance accusing Donovan of abdicating his responsibility and of a “miscarriage of justice.” Most Islanders, however, saw it as a prosecutor refusing to bow to political winds.
In New York, district attorneys have a tendency to grow moss-bound in their roles. Robert Morgenthau, after all, retired at age 90. Donovan has shown some further ambition, running for attorney general in 2010 on a platform that in part promised to reverse the office’s focus on Wall Street that Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer brought to it.
“My goal is not to destroy people’s lives and disrupt entire industries because there are a few people in there that are corrupt.”
Donovan however proved to be a lackluster debater and an unenthusiastic campaigner, and an even more reticent fundraiser, relying heavily on the largesse of Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the support of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. At his concession speech, he told his staff to get ready to go work the next day.
Donovan had been privately concerned that running statewide would hurt his standing back home. Instead, the next year he won by 40 points.
And there are few people on Staten Island who see his presence diminishing in the wake of the Garner decision.
“He could have killed the guy himself and still would get re-elected,” said one Island Democrat. “Everybody just loves Danny. To them, the guy can do no wrong.”
There has been much talk in Island political circles that Donovan would run for Congress one day if Grimm is in fact forced to step down due to his legal troubles. Most politicos there, though, think that the way he handled the grand jury could only help him in a district with a substantial number of active or retired police officers.
“When the dust settles, I just don’t see it hurting him,” said Rich Flanagan, a professor of political science at the College of Staten Island. “This is no place for unreconstructed New York liberals.”
Molinari, the Island power-broker who launched Donovan’s career, agreed.
“[Garner] is saying ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,’ but how do you interpret that? They were trying to arrest him, he was resisting, and he is a big guy, so it took quite a few cops to do that, and a tragedy occurred. It can happen any place.”
By: David Freedlander, The Daily Beast, December 4, 2014
“Justice Must Satisfy The Appearance Of Justice”: The System Must Counteract Prosecutors’ Natural Sympathies For Cops
“Justice must satisfy the appearance of justice,” Felix Frankfurter wrote, in a Supreme Court case 60 years ago.
That edict — a foundation of democracy — has not been observed in some recent high-profile cases in which grand juries have refused to indict police officers for killing unarmed African-Americans. The resulting injury is not just to criminal justice but to the legitimacy of the government itself.
As a former prosecutor let me put this as directly as possible: Blame the prosecutors, not the grand jurors. There is one reason that Daniel Pantaleo is not being charged in the death of Eric Garner. It’s because District Attorney Dan Donovan of Staten Island did not want him to be.
Why not? The cynical point of view is that Donovan was playing to his base. Staten Island is the whitest and most conservative borough in New York. It’s also home for many cops. Maybe Donovan figured he would take heat however the grand jury came out, but the people who would be protesting in the street in the event of no indictment did not include most of his electorate.
But there is a more benign explanation. Maybe Donovan just appreciates that cops have one of the most difficult jobs in the world, and so, he cuts them some slack. It’s a very human reaction.
I speak from whence I know. One reason I became a prosecutor is that I had a number of bad experiences with the police where they racially profiled or just generally disrespected me. I thought I could go in as an undercover brother and change the system from the inside. What happened instead is that the system changed me.
When you work with cops every day you definitely gain more respect for their difficult work. And you need them to help you make your cases (every prosecutor has experienced having a police officer catch an attitude, sometimes in the middle of a trial, and purposely ruin your case because they don’t like you).
And finally policing is like most other employment — a few people do most of the work. So prosecutors see the same cops over and over, and they bond with them. It’s not so much that they excuse egregious misconduct as that they cast a blind eye. Nothing irks a cop more than an elitist prosecutor treating him or her like “some suspect.”
So the problem stems from the culture of the prosecutor’s office, compounded by the fact that, like most lawyers, prosecutors are competitive and ambitious and the way you move ahead is to win your cases, and the way you win cases is get your star witnesses — the cops — to go the extra mile. All that makes it really tough to try to send one of them to prison — even when they have messed up big time, as I believe Pantaleo did when he placed Eric Garner in a banned chokehold.
In a democracy, no one should be above the law. It’s fine for citizens to profoundly respect the men and women who serve as law enforcement officers. But when those people break the law, they must be held accountable just like anyone else. The automatic appointment of special prosecutors in criminal investigations of police is the best way to avoid district attorneys’ natural biases and make sure that justice satisfies the appearance of justice.
By: Paul Butler, Former Prosecutor and a Professor at Georgetown University Law Center; The Opinion Pages, Room for Debate, The New York Times, December 4, 2014
“No Voice Of Reason”: ‘I Can’t Breathe!’ ‘I Can’t Breathe!’ A Moral Indictment Of Cop Culture
The grand jury has spoken, but that does not change what Eric Garner cried out in the cellphone video taken as police pinned him to a Staten Island sidewalk.
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” Garner said again and again that August day.
And even though the grand jury has now chosen not to bring criminal charges in Garner’s death, the video footage that follows those cries constitutes a moral indictment not so much of what the police did but of what the police did not do.
“At that point, forget the cop side,” a longtime veteran police officer not party to the incident says of the moment Garner cries out. “The human side comes in.”
Yet the cops do not seem even to hear Garner.
“I don’t see anyone in that video saying, ‘Look, we got to ease up,’” says the veteran officer. “Where’s the human side of you in that you’ve got a guy saying, ‘I can’t breathe?’”
The veteran officer goes on, “Somebody needs to say, ‘Stop it!’ That’s what’s missing here was a voice of reason. The only voice we’re hearing is of Eric Garner.”
The veteran officer believes Garner might have survived had anybody heeded his pleas.
“He could have had a chance,” says the officer, who is black. “But you got to believe he’s a human being first. A human being saying, ‘I can’t breathe.’”
What may have saved Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo from indictment is that a close examination of the video shows he had had released his chokehold on Garner just before the 43-year-old father of six began crying out that he could not breathe. Pantaleo by then was shifting around to press the prone man’s head into the pavement.
None of the cops in the video are beating Garner. And in two hours of questioning by the grand jurors on Nov. 22, Pantaleo apparently convinced them that he had not intended to injure Garner, only to place him under arrest. Pantaleo was held blameless even though the medical examiner had ruled the death a homicide resulting from “compression of the neck [chokehold], compression of chest, and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.”
But the absence of criminal charges does not make the indifference to Garner’s distress any more forgivable. There were still those cries, cries that rose again Wednesday afternoon from the same grimy patch of pavement where Garner died, voiced by two dozen members of the community who stood shocked and angered by the news that no cop would be charged.
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!”
They added a chant that rose in Ferguson, where another grand jury had declined to indict Police Officer Darren Wilson in the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
A 25-year-old man named Alexander Cooper strode up the sidewalk holding his 3-year-old daughter, Alexis, by the hand. He told her what he also would have said had they been walking in Ferguson, no matter what the differences between the two cases.
“I just told her that a black man was killed and there were no charges,” he said.
He added, “As I father, I want to live and watch my children grow.”
Cooper spoke of how pained he was that Garner will never get that chance with his own kids. Little Alexis pulled on his hand.
“I have my daddy right here!” she announced.
Cooper had little Alexis pose for a picture on the exact spot there Garner was pinned. Alexis did not know to act differently than she might for any other picture taken of her by her daddy. Her bright little smile in this place of senseless death constituted a challenge to all of us to make the future more in keeping with this sparkle of life at its most pure and innocent.
“I’m going to show it to her in the future,” Cooper said of the picture. “I’m going to show her she was here.”
We can only hope that she will marvel at how much the city and country have changed.
Earlier in the day, before the decision became known, Jonathan Mejia and Natassia McClean had come up to this spot pushing a stroller that bore an even younger challenge of the future, their 6-month-old son, Jerimiah. Mejia looked at a rain-sodden sign reading “BIG ERIC R.I.P.” and flowers left after Garner’s death that had wilted during the four long months of the grand jury’s investigation.
“I knew somebody else killed by the police,” 21-year-old Mejia said.
The couple had recently moved to Staten Island from the Bronx, where Mejia had been buddies with 18-year-old Ramarley Graham. Police had burst into Graham’s home in 2012 after seeing him in the street adjusting something in his waistband that might have been a gun. He was in the bathroom, perhaps trying to flush some pot down the toilet, when a cop burst in.
The cop shot and killed Graham, later saying the teen had reached for his waistband. No gun was found, and in this instance the cop was indicted. A judge then tossed the indictment out, saying the prosecutor had made an error in presenting the evidence. A second grand jury declined to indict the cop.
Mejia now stood where Garner died and spoke Graham’s name aloud.
“That was my friend,” he said.
This second tragedy reconfirmed in Mejia’s mind what the earlier killing had led him to conclude about the police and people of color.
“They don’t look at us like regular human beings,” he said.
The baby was dozing as Mejia and McClean pushed him on down the street, the parents not seeming to take any great comfort in the police having transformed New York into the safest big city in America in recent years.
In truth, the police routinely place themselves in great danger while continuing to bring crime in New York to record lows. And many of them live by words that Pantaleo at least professed in a statement released Wednesday through the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.
“I became a police officer to help people and to protect those who can’t protect themselves,” Pantaleo said.
He went on to say, “It is never my intention to harm anyone and I feel very bad about the death of Mr. Garner. My family and I include him and his family in our prayers and I hope that they will accept my personal condolences for their loss.”
Nice sentiments from a guy who seemed deaf to Garner’s pleas that he was unable to breathe.
“The time for remorse was when my husband was yelling to breathe!” Garner’s widow, Esaw Garner, told a press conference Wednesday.
Pantaleo comes from Eltingville, the overwhelmingly white section of Staten Island that was home to Police Officer Justin Volpe, who is presently in prison for sodomizing Abner Louima with a wooden stick in a stationhouse bathroom. Eltingville is not known for being progressive on matters of race, but Volpe’s family is said not to have been racist, and he had a black fiancée. Pantaleo is also not necessarily a manifest racist.
“I think it’s just cop culture,” a longtime Eltingville resident said Wednesday.
That unfairly characterizes the many decent cops, but there is indeed one element of cop culture that tends to dehumanize or at least objectify suspected lawbreakers of whatever race. The instant you are deemed a candidate for arrest, you become not so much a person as a “perp.”
“You’re dehumanizing the person,” the veteran black police officer says.
In the view of some cops, perps merit little concern or sympathy. This is particularly true when such cops are focused on effecting an arrest. The result can be the indifference that appears so chilling in the Garner video.
“You’re not even hearing [the perp] at this point; you’re dealing with this non-human,” the veteran police officer says.
The veteran officer notes that even in the most extreme mixed martial arts bouts, a fighter can “tap out,” signaling he has had enough.
“Eric Garner didn’t have a chance to tap out,” the veteran officer says.
The whole incident becomes all the more shocking when you consider that Garner was being arrested for selling “loosies,” individual and usually untaxed cigarettes. The police had arrested him repeatedly in the spring and into the summer in response to orders originally with Chief of Department Phil Banks, third in command of the NYPD. Banks’s office had reportedly been receiving complaints from local storeowners about people selling loosies in the street. One caller had mentioned “a man named Eric.”
“They feel like they’re driven to produce, and producing means arrests,” the veteran officer says of fellow cops in such instances.
For reasons entirely unrelated to Garner’s death, Banks retired in October. He happens to be black, and his departure was seen as a blow to the NYPD’s efforts to establish better relations with communities of color.
With the grand jury’s failure to indict Garner and the recent accidental shooting of an unarmed young man by a jittery rookie cop in a darkened housing protect stairwell in Brooklyn, those relations have become decidedly tense, despite the city’s proudly progressive new mayor, Bill de Blasio.
Garner’s family and their supporters are hoping the U.S. Justice Department will indict Pantaleo on civil-rights charges, as it did Police Officer Francis Livotti, who employed a chokehold on 29-year-old Anthony Baez some 20 years ago in the Bronx, with fatal results. The Livotti case led to the NYPD’s prohibition against the use of chokeholds, which it defines as bringing pressure to bear on the airways.
On Wednesday evening, some residents of Staten Island boarded the ferry to join protesters who were gathering in Times Square, not far from Rockefeller Center, where the big event of the night was scheduled to be the annual Christmas tree lighting.
As a precaution against a possible disturbance, the ferry was escorted by a police boat, its blue lights flashing. The boat was named in memory of Det. Dillon Stewart, a black police officer who was shot to death in the line of duty in Brooklyn in 2005, leaving two young daughters. The whole city mourned Stewart’s loss and honored him as a hero in the ongoing effort to make New York safe.
There was no trouble on the ferry as it reached Manhattan and a few of the passengers boarded the subway to the protest uptown. The cry that rose up into the night signaled a moral indictment no matter what the grand jury had said.
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!”
By: Michael Daly, The Daily Beast, December 3, 2014
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