Posted on 12/10/2014 12:14:35 PM PST by Kaslin
The grand jury got all the facts, including the various autopsies.
It may have been unnoticed by many here, but because of political pressure, the medical examiner changed his original findings after receiving pressure from the office of the mayor, since the original report cited Gardner’s preexisting health problems that the stress of his confrontation and attempting to shove the cop and resist arrest had evidently activated. Calling it homicide (not the original decision) simply meant that it immediately involved another human being in the chain of causation, which in this case would have meant the cops who were trying to pull Garner back from assaulting the arresting officer.
It was Garner’s fault.
He didn’t loose consciousness. He was breathing and talking at least until he entered the ambulance.
EMS was there within 3 minutes, which is pretty darn good. EMS assessed him, got him on a stretcher, which took several minutes due to height and morbid obesity.
According to differing accounts, he had previously been in a fight, or was breaking one up. Either way, his body would have been under stress. Friends indicated he couldn’t walk a block without stopping, due to his asthma (and heart condition, etc.). So, when the police arrived, and he was on probation, his stress level increased. When he decided to resist, up it goes again. The police had no way of knowing these issues, except that he was on parole.
Finally, when he said “I can’t breathe,” the first time, they moved very quickly. Sure, somebody kept him down for another minute or so, but that’s because of his size.
This whole affair is being used as a political issue by both right and left, and shouldn’t be. This guy’s body was a time bomb.
In NYC, you pay $4.35 per pack on smokes. I can say this....if the Alabama or Tennessee legislature ever got the nerve to push their 42-cent/62-cent level to $4.35...we’d have 20,000 Eric Garners out the in various parking lots and selling untaxed smokes just like this guy. And yeah, we’d challenge any cop trying to arrest us for selling loose smokes.
If NYC had a regular tax of 70-odd cents on a pack...Garner and the other 3,000-odd illegal salesmen of the city....wouldn’t be out there and requiring a massive amount of city cop efforts to enforce a stupid smokes tax.
Plus in the Rodney King trial, the police were following current policy To The Letter. That video still makes me cringe and seems wrong to me, but if I’d been on that jury, I would have voted the same way.
I haven’t watched the Garner footage but I’m sure it’d give me the same horrible feeling in my gut — however, I am not going to tell the cops they can’t arrest people who are in fragile health, and I have no better suggestions on how to deal with that situation. Likely I would have voted the same way on that one as well, since I would assume the jury grappled with that situation and judged it based on Standard Procedure, which seems the reasonable approach to me.
I see a lot of these arguments coming from the same place as “we ought to be able to eliminate death from cause x entirely” sort of things. But even on that front, people pick and choose. Swimming pools cause more accidental deaths than guns, but nobody’s out there demanding the elimination of swimming pools. Cars and high speeds cause more accidental deaths than anything, but notice how lowering the national speed limit to 55 went. Life is risk, and Garner was the one with the knowledge and the ability to minimize the risk of that situation. He chose not to, and that isn’t the fault of the arresting officers.
If you owned a small ‘store’ that sold mostly tobacco products and someone kept hanging out in front of your store selling loosies from black market cigarettes, harrassing customers, and you were losing money because of it, AND the same guy kept coming back every day and doing the same thing, would you call the cops ?
The bigger question is...what idiot would pay $10 for a pack of smokes? I just can’t think of anyone who would accept this type of taxation.
What idiots are buying loosies at $1.50 a piece ?
That’s $30 a pack. Since Eric was buying black market cigs they probably cost him $5.00 a pack.
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