The NY Daily News reports:
What makes the Garner case so much different than Michael Brown’s is that the Staten Island killing can’t be called a racial incident.
Pantaleo who applied the lethal chokehold on Eric Garner was supervised by an African-American female NYPD sergeant..VIDEO
Having that black sergeant in charge of that crime scene takes race out of the equation. As awful as Pantaleo’s actions appear on that video, at no time does that black sergeant order Pantaleo to stop choking Garner.
With a population that is 70% white and 10% African-American, when a Staten Island grand jury is presented with a white cop supervised by a black sergeant applying a lethal chokehold, it eliminates the racial component.
The grand jury was then left with the decision of whether Pantaleo had malicious intentions. It decided that he did not. Case closed.
Murder was never on the table here. But many legal experts believed that video alone met the burden to bring reckless manslaughter or negligent homicide charges against Pantaleo.
Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan is known to be tough and fair. But he’s also a politician who faces the voters every four years. And so this radioactive case that probably would have earned a felony indictment in any of the other four boroughs of New York City could have been a career-wrecker
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