This case goes to show everyone that cops can kill people without sanction for violating petty laws.
3. Garner, 43, had history of more than 30 arrests dating back to 1980, on charges including assault and grand larceny.
How many convictions? (How many wrongful arrests?) This report doesn't say. But being arrested for something doesn't prove guilt, and especially so in a jurisdiction where cops profile.
4. At the time of his death, Garner was out on bail after being charged with illegally selling cigarettes, driving without a license, marijuana possession and false impersonation.
On the other hand, how many crimes does someone have to have under their belt to be held away from society?
5. The chokehold that Patrolman Daniel Pantaleo put on Garner was reported to have contributed to his death. But Garner, who was 6-foot-3 and weighed 350 pounds, suffered from a number of health problems, including heart disease, severe asthma, diabetes, obesity, and sleep apnea. Pantaleo's attorney and police union officials argued that Garner's poor health was the main cause of his death.
The "but" (underlined) does not logically belong. Chokeholds were banned, and the cop apparently used one. Police brutality is a worse crime than selling untaxed cigarettes.
6. Garner did not die at the scene of the confrontation. He suffered cardiac arrest in the ambulance taking him to the hospital and was pronounced dead about an hour later.
So? If a citizen fought a police officer and the officer died an hour later, you can be sure the citizen would have been charged in the death.
7. Much has been made of the fact that the use of chokeholds by police is prohibited in New York City. But officers reportedly still use them. Between 2009 and mid-2014, the Civilian Complaint Review Board received 1,128 chokehold allegations.
So, apparently, not enough has been made of this fact, because police are still acting in contravention to policy. Such officers should be sanctioned, from loss of pay to being fired to facing criminal charges.
Patrick Lynch, president of the New York City Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, said: "It was clear that the officer's intention was to do nothing more than take Mr. Garner into custody as instructed, and that he used the takedown technique that he learned in the academy when Mr. Garner refused."
Irrespective of where he learned it, if it was banned, it was banned.
9. The 23-member grand jury included nine non-white jurors.
This fact is meaningless without some indication of the necessary majority. If it was the case of a simple majority, then the blacks are outnumbered and could have unanimously voted to indict without result.
10. In order to find Officer Pantaleo criminally negligent, the grand jury would have had to determine that he knew there was a "substantial risk" that Garner would have died due to the takedown.
Why was the chokehold banned? Why didn't the officer comply with the ban? Did the officer ever learn of cases, or was he ever officially told, of the fact and/or reason of the ban? Which chokehold he nevertheless elected to use on an obviously obese person?
11. Less than a month after Garner's death, Ramsey Orta, who shot the much-viewed videotape of the encounter, was indicted on weapons charges. Police alleged that Orta had slipped a .25-caliber handgun into a teenage accomplice's waistband outside a New York hotel.
This is nothing more than an attack-the-messenger fallacy. Unless the video is being alleged to be fake, what sort of person Orta is has zero bearing on the facts of the Garner case, and one has to wonder what is the agenda of any person who raises this issue.
1. Which cop specifically killed him and how?
1a. If you choose to resist an arrest order, then it is possible that you can die as a result of that choice.
3. None of that matters. What does matter is that he resisted an arrest order that day.
5. It was not a choke hold. At no time in that video did I see the officer purposely attempt to prevent Garner from breathing or receiving natural blood flow to the brain, and and no time during the time period that the officer was in contact with garner did Garner lose consciouness, which the the result of a chokehold.
6. From what I saw in the video, it looked to me that Garner was dead before he was in the ambulance, but that is just my opinion, I have no proof of that.
6a. A citizen does not have the right to fight a police officer whereas an officer does have the right to arrest a citizen, and that citizen does not have the right to resist that arrest. If a person fights an officer and that officer later dies as a result of that fight, then that person should be charged in that death.
7. It wasn’t a choke hold.
9. The necessary majority was 12.
10. It wasn’t a choke hold.
11. The record of the person who filmed Garner’s arrest is not relevant in my mind. I am glad he filmed it so that I could watch it and decide for myself to be perfectly honest. So I definitely agree here.