It’s legal to kill black people in this country if you are a police officer. This is not hyperbole.
A Staten Island grand jury has voted not to bring criminal charges against the white New York City police officer at the center of the Eric Garner case, a person briefed on the matter said Wednesday.
The decision was reached on Wednesday after months of testimony including from the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who used a chokehold to restrain Mr. Garner, who died after a confrontation. It came less than two weeks after a grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., declined to bring charges against a white officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown.
I am not talking about it being difficult to convict a police officer who kills a black person. I’m saying that no defense is even necessary. The whole thing can be captured on film. An illegal chokehold can be used. It doesn’t matter. If you’re a police officer, you won’t even have to explain yourself in front of a judge.
In this case, an asthmatic man was killed while being arrested for selling cigarettes. Was it murder? Was it manslaughter? Was it negligent?
No. Not legally, anyway. It wasn’t anything, actually. It was just a man dying on the street. On film. There is no need to file charges. No legal defense need be argued.
The police killed a man and it means nothing. Essentially, it never happened.
Sometimes, the police just kill a guy in the line of duty, and that’s pretty much the same as when they don’t kill a guy. No difference.
“Hi, honey, how was work today?”
“Pretty good. Killed a guy.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Choked him out.”
“…I made chicken.”
“Great. I’m hungry.”
Like that.
People are going to complain about this, but it’s pretty much just how shit goes these days.
Somebody with legal knowledge is going to have to enlighten me about this. What is with the police officers testifying in their own defense before the grand jury? Isn’t that really unusual not to mention probably a really bad idea? My understanding is in a grand jury there’s no judge to make sure things are run properly, there’s no cross-examination, and stuff like hearsay and leading questions are totally routine. So isn’t having the defendant testify before the grand jury a pretty severe perversion of justice?
Yes.
This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.
You could have stuck a bunch of KKK members in a grand jury, and they would have indicted James Earl Ray.
It’s the prosecutor’s world, and the jurors are just squatters.
Just saw it on Twitter. Honestly, I don’t know what the fuck to even say anymore. My wife and I were talking last night about how we are simply unable to even begin to conceive how it must feel to be a person of color in this country right now. Literally, there is not a fucking thing that a cop could do in this country that would get him indicted for killing someone while they are on duty. Just look at what has come down in the course of a week. The Ferguson verdict. A child, for fuck’s sake, A FUCKING CHILD, gunned down like a rabid animal in Cleveland. And now this. How in the hell can we even call this country a land of freedom and liberty with a blind system of justice? I am simply ashamed of what we are. Totally and sickeningly ashamed.
The system protects itself.
It’s one of the arguments that AG makes, and one of the reasons why I don’t taunt him. He sees it, just with different shaped glasses than lefties.
When I said long ago that this country was becoming fascist I wasn’t exaggerating.
We have been since the late 40s. No, seriously.
h/t RT
Cross-posted from Marie2’s recent diary – Cops Score Lower on Racism.
“A grand jury in Staten Island…”
Any thoughts on that, Martin, given the demographics of Staten Island?
The jurors don’t matter. What the prosecutor wants does.
The same place that reelected to Congress anger management reject and possible criminal Michael Grimm.
It’s also the home of almost every cop in New York.
“Why, it’s almost as if the grand jury system is just a convenient means for prosecutors to get the outcome they want wrapped in a veneer of due process. “
Picked that up on Huff Post. It is true.
Neither the officer who shot and killed John Crawford nor the “former Marine” who placed the exaggerated 911 call were held accountable, either. Beavercreek, Ohio, still lily white and without a mark on their record.
When Obama was elected, I should have known that instead of easing tension in the US, it would inflame racism to new heights. Surely the ghosts of Medgar Evers and Emmett Till walk the streets again, knowing their deaths were in vain.
Evidence that the latter has occurred? Being more frequently reported doesn’t mean that the rate of police or white men shooting black men/boys has increased. It’s possible that it has actually declined during the past few years.
Remember the “Summer of the Shark Attacks – 2001” — national freakout over a completely normal number of shark attacks.
In Cincinnati, during 2001, there were riots because an unarmed black man had been murdered by a police officer. I remember it well.
I’m disgusted by police officers acting like occupying soldiers, shooting first and then getting away with it, regardless of the victim’s race. And if I were going to bet, I’d bet that less black men and women are shot to death by police now than 20 years ago.
I hate the system, because we’re basically training police officers as soldiers, and now giving them soldier’s weapons.
That they act like soldiers shouldn’t be a surprise.
it’s not new
“It’s legal to kill black people in this country if you are a police officer. This is not hyperbole.”
Okay, stop right there. Strike the word “black” from your sentence and it loses nothing; it gains generality, it gains truth, and it should gain force.
The problem is that police are unaccountable. No — I say sillies — the problem is that most people believe that police have to be unaccountable to do their jobs.
It may help to use specific examples to draw attention to a problem, but once you begin to get people’s attention, the problem has to be correctly defined in order to have any chance of doing anything about it. And this one is really big, much bigger than “black”.
Oh, bullshit.
Are police too unaccountable in general? Sure. But when it comes to people of color, police are significantly less accountable for their actions than when they fuck with white people.
If you really want to “correctly define” the problem, you first have to know what you’re talking about.
Police subject Black men to more violence than they do whites. However, the race of the victim of police violence isn’t much, if any, of a factor in holding the LEO to account. In general LEOs walk even in the rare instances that they are indicted and go through a criminal trial.
There is a system in this country.
Police officers and the Prosecutors who have 100% discretion on whether someone is brought up on charges, happen to be on the same side of that system.
That’s the problem.
Always factor up.
“It’s the unaccountability, Stupid!”
It is not just police, it is military (it began there; a whole separate body of law had to be created over centuries), it is business, it is potentially any institution of authority. Accountability is in eclipse and retreat. And there is no incremental way to restore it; it takes a break of institutional continuity and the creation of a new system that is (nominally!) accountable from the start.
We mostly got where we are by letting people off the hook. On that level, it doesn’t matter who and it doesn’t matter why.
But the other part of how we got where we are is by carving out exceptions. This is a different kind of bad magic. It doesn’t matter whether the exceptions are larcenous or remedial:
The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone;
The law cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
So, is it cheaper to let this be settled in civil court where the costs are insured than to criminal court where the costs are paid with taxes?
Not an either/or question. Defending a LEO in a criminal trial is expensive and not a stretch to consider that police unions know where some of that money would come from. And liability insurance (paid for with taxes) isn’t an escape hatch because it may cover only part of an award and future insurance premiums will be much higher.
The civil suits rarely go to trial, usually settled out of court. Rodney King’s suit was an exception but it went to trial after two of the LEOs were found guilty in federal court. Difficult to say if King would have been better off accepting a settlement offer from the City, but the City may have done better not to meet whatever price King’s lawyers demanded.
It appears that white police officers are legally allowed to murder black men who are involved with illegal tobacco products, no?
This country is taking the war against smoking to a whole new level.
Ughhhhh!
I just can’t even right now. I’m at work and I am literally dying inside.
Also on camera:
Grand Jury Clears Two Former Jasper Cops Who Beat Woman in Jail
Another recording of cops behaving very, very badly and doesn’t change the outcome of the investigation of the incident.
Similar outcome in an Orange County TX incident, but James Whitehead, was shot to death.
you are correct, BooMan