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New Proposal Would Provide Grand Juries With Eyes |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Thursday, 04 December 2014 13:56 |
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Borowitz writes: "On the heels of an initiative to provide police departments with body cameras, there is growing support for a plan to supply grand-jury members with eyes, advocates for the plan said on Wednesday."
Demonstrators listen to speakers during a rally on the campus of Saint Louis University on Oct. 13. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
New Proposal Would Provide Grand Juries With Eyes
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
04 December 14
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 n the heels of an initiative to provide police departments with body cameras, there is growing support for a plan to supply grand-jury members with eyes, advocates for the plan said on Wednesday.
“Body cameras are an important part of the solution,” said Harland Dorrinson, who is lobbying Washington to equip grand juries with the sense of sight. “But I strongly believe that if you take video evidence and add eyes, the combination would be unstoppable.”
Some critics of Dorrinson’s proposal say that it does not go far enough, and that in order to process information sent from their eyes grand juries would also need to be fitted with working brains.
“Yes, in a perfect world, all grand juries would have brains,” Dorrinson said. “But progress is an incremental thing. Let’s start with eyes and eventually work our way up to brains.”
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What the Eric Garner Grand Jury Didn't See |
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Thursday, 04 December 2014 13:54 |
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Davidson writes: "There was nothing mysterious about Garner's death, and nothing just about it, either. Because of a cell-phone video, most of the city knew it, too."
(photo: Ron Haviv)
ALSO SEE: Justice Department Track Record on Civil Rights Cases Does Not Inspire Confidence
What the Eric Garner Grand Jury Didn't See
By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker
04 December 14
 n a statement on Wednesday night, Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to tell New Yorkers that the official response to the death of Eric Garner had involved everything that they would want—sympathetic calls, public mourning, a retraining of the whole police force, “so many reforms this year”—everything, that is, except criminal accountability for the officer who had held Garner in a chokehold in the moments before he died. Word had just come that a grand jury had decided not to indict the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, on any charge at all. De Blasio asked for calm and peaceful protests, and he did not try to defend the grand-jury decision—“Today’s outcome is one that many in our city did not want”—and it would have been hard for him to do so. There was nothing mysterious about Garner’s death, and nothing just about it, either. Because of a cell-phone video, most of the city knew it, too.
The video was why, after de Blasio spoke, marchers took to the streets all over the city, with hundreds in Times Square. Videos have brought out crowds before; often, it’s because they show an injustice or an outrage. The Garner video had done that, but, in a way that now seems maddening, it had also promised justice. When Garner’s mother heard that it existed, she told Jonathan Blitzer, “I said to myself, ‘There is a God.’ ” Having a video removed the ambiguities often inserted into accounts of confrontations between police officers and civilians. Anyone could see Garner talking to a clutch of uniformed and plainclothesmen in front of a store on Bay Street, in Staten Island, on July 17th. He said that they should stop harassing him—the question was whether he was selling loose, untaxed cigarettes. Garner was six feet three inches tall. He was also overweight, asthmatic, and outnumbered. The video shows that he did not move on the police. They moved on him. Pantaleo’s chokehold move is visible, and visibly at odds with the N.Y.P.D.’s own regulations. Pantaleo adjusts his hold only to push Garner’s face to the pavement—he is now lying prone—by which time Garner is saying the last words that he ever will: “I can’t breathe.” Actually, these were his last words:
I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
On Wednesday night, protesters were shouting those words across the city and printing them on signs. But, even on the day that Garner died, people yards away heard it (the video captures a man quoting Garner), and the police certainly did as well. When paramedics arrived, they stood around diffidently; the officers did not convey a sense of urgency about anything except getting bystanders to walk away. Garner was not a particularly healthy man, but an autopsy showed that the primary causes of death were “compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police”—the exact actions caught on camera. He was forty-three and had six children.
Staten Island makes Ferguson a lot harder to explain. What happens to the platitudes used to patiently instruct us about differing witness accounts and unanswerable questions, and all the solemn wishes that a camera had recorded the confrontation between Michael Brown, who was eighteen, and officer Darren Wilson? All that uncertainty was supposed to be why the Ferguson grand jury didn’t come back with an indictment. A dispute over facts is often a reason to go to trial, not a reason to avoid it—but even so. None of that mistiness had settled over the events on Staten Island, and there were no charges there, either. And, if doubt is factored out, what’s left? Many observers will notice that in both cases the officer was white, and the dead man was black.
Maybe that’s not it at all; but then New York needs to know why the grand jury turned away from what everyone else saw. The Garner case is so stark that politicians like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand rushed to express support for a federal civil-rights investigation. Eric Holder, the Attorney General, said that there would be one—“independent, thorough, fair and expeditious”—and also talked about how Garner’s death “tested the sense of trust” between the communities and the police. (The investigation should fall to the office of U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, who has been nominated to succeed Holder.) “This is an American problem,” President Obama said.
As a matter of process, the route to the failure to indict is probably simple: the prosecutor who presented the case led the grand jurors that way. That’s how grand juries tend to work (and why criticisms of the outcome should not be taken as an attack on individual jurors); the bar for them to find probable cause to charge a person is low, unless—as transcripts show was the case in Ferguson—prosecutors decide to raise it. Given the incarceration rates in this country, most people don’t need a video tape to know that. The proceedings in Staten Island are still secret, but Pantaleo’s lawyer, Stuart London, told the Times that his client spoke to the grand jury for two hours. (Most potential defendants don’t get that chance.) “He wanted to get across to the grand jury that it was never his intention to injure or harm anyone,” London said. Pantaleo repeated that sentiment in a statement on Wednesday, adding that he had become a police officer to “protect” people and that Garner’s death made him feel bad: “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.”
A central issue in cases like this is a failure to fully value black lives. That alone can be deadly. But we should also ask about a companion problem, one that shows itself the most with regard to accountability: an over-weighting of white intentions. As any prosecutor knows, there are offenses on the books that don’t turn on a will to murder, or crude racism, or even unkindness. Officer Pantaleo says that he didn’t want to kill anyone; Officer Wilson was scared. Each of them might still have been charged with a crime.
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The Eric Garner Case and Police Lawlessness |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Thursday, 04 December 2014 13:53 |
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Pierce writes: "Are we still having the national conversation? And what, pray tell, is it about now? Race? Fear? Trigger-happy policin'?"
Amnesty International report is critical of Ferguson police. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
The Eric Garner Case and Police Lawlessness
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
04 December 14
In Paris the officers of the law delivered the prisoner to the mob. The mayor gave the school children a holiday and the railroads ran excursion trains so that the people might see a human being burned to death.
-- Ida B. Wells, 1900
 re we still having the national conversation? And what, pray tell, is it about now? Race? Fear? Trigger-happy policin'? (By the way, the phrase comes from a Marvin Gaye song that was released on September 16, 19freaking71.) The decision of a Staten Island grand jury not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for anything in the videotaped strangulation death of Eric Garner seems to have rocked even those people who are completely convinced that Darren Wilson had no other good option but to exorcise the demon that was Michael Brown.
(Chief among these is the formidably awful Joe Scarborough, who is terribly upset by this police killing and would like you to know that his opinions on police killings are completely color-blind, that he is a brave truth-teller who examines all the evidence and bases his opinions on the empirical facts of each case -- Michael Schiavo just had a good laugh, by the way -- and that selling loose cigarettes should not be a capital crime in the way that shoplifting cigarillos is, and that Ralph Waldo Emerson and he agree totally on the subject so shut up.)
Yes, gang. Police officers kill black people and get away with it through the system of justice all the time, even when there's not cool video of what went down. This has been going on for years. It is not a bug, it is a feature of the American way of justice, and it has been since before the American way of justice was even American. Sorry you're shocked, but, hey, welcome to the fight for anti-lynching laws. Nice to have you on board. Maybe later we can all go out and see that new Valentino moving picture down at the Palace.
There are a whole lot of reasons for this, and we should decide if we're still having national conversations about any of them, but one of the primary ones is that, in many places and in many cases, there is a fundamental contempt for the law among the people empowered to enforce it. And this is not just about the laws regarding ventilating your fellow citizens in the street, or choking them to death on camera. It is about the paperish regulations already in place to prevent what happened to, say, Amadou Diallo from happening to Michael Brown or Eric Garner. For example, the technique through which Daniel Pantaleo ended the life of Eric Garner has been forbidden by departmental regulations since 1993. The official autopsy on Eric Garner said that he died from being asphyxiated through the use of this technique. It called his death a homicide. And it is on video. You can see it. The chokehold is the first club out of Officer Pantaleo's bag. Did the departmental regulation stop him? Did Eric Garner's well-publicized killing -- and Pantaleo's well-publicized suspension -- stop his brother officers from using a similar technique on a pregnant woman? No, these things only forced Pantaleo and his lawyers to come up with a creative explanation.
During the proceedings, jurors were shown three videos of the encounter, and in his testimony Officer Pantaleo sought to characterize his actions as a maneuver taught at the Police Academy. He said that while holding onto Mr. Garner, he felt fear that they would crash through a plate glass storefront as they tumbled to the ground, said Stuart London, his lawyer. One of the officer's arms went around Mr. Garner's throat, as Mr. Garner repeatedly said, "I can't breathe, I can't breathe."
(It should be noted here that NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, who has been all over TV being mournful about this "tragedy," and who is now the only person sitting in judgment over Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, thinks that the use of chokeholds is best left to be litigated within the Department. "I don't feel that there's a law that's necessary to deal with that issue," Bratton said after the hearing. "I think there are more than sufficient protocols in place to address a problem." Well, OK, then.)
And then there is the Violent Crime Controland Law Enforcement Act, which was passed by Congress in 1994. This law requires that local police forces report to the Attorney General and to the Department Of Justice all charges of the use of excessive force by their offices so that the DOJ can publish an annual report. The local chiefs of police simply have blown this off, which is, I would remind you, against the law. (A blogger named Jim Fisher has tried to keep a thorough account of these incidents.) The king irony of the whole thing is that the Act itself was a get-tough measure that also created 60 new federal death-penalty categories. The assault weapons ban was part of it, as was the Violence Against Women Act. The reporting requirement was added in the wake of the beating of Rodney King, which also was on videotape, and which also changed, well, nothing.
This flaunting of both departmental rules and federal law on the part of local police departments is the clearest indication that they consider themselves beyond the law they are sworn to enforce. And why shouldn't they? The systems by which they are supposed to be held accountable are intolerably weak, where they are not broken altogether. Where are the stiff fines for the police chiefs who ignore the requirements of federal law? What good are departmental sanctions when officers get filmed blithely using techniques that those sanctions supposedly banned two decades ago? It has become plain that, in far too many cases and in far too many places, local police departments have made of themselves what Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 concerning the use of British troops to enforce the law in the colonies -- "independent of and superior to the civil power." Once there, these departments operate with impunity according to the informal dynamics of American law and American justice that were born when the country was. And, among other things, that means more Eric Garners and Michael Browns and Tamir Rices, the latter a 12-year old shot down by a cop in Cleveland who'd been hired anyway despite the fact that responsibilities of being a cop in a suburb were too much for him. Makes me wanna holler, too.
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"Drop His F***** Ass, Drop His Ass!!" Another Unarmed Black Man Killed by White Police |
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Thursday, 04 December 2014 13:52 |
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Vibes reports: "This week, the family of a Virginia man who was killed by police is filing for an appeal in their lawsuit against the city, which was railroaded out of court last year after the incident occurred."
(photo: unknown)
"Drop His F***** Ass, Drop His Ass!!" Another Unarmed Black Man Killed by White Police
By John Vibes, The Free Thought Project
04 December 14
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk4_wV4i5wQ#t=119
 he officer told him in so many words that anything could be considered a weapon, so Jones admitted calmly, “I do have something on me then.” Again, without giving Jones the ability to even finish what he was saying, the officer got aggressive, this time grabbing him and attempting to subdue him.
Throughout the altercation Jones continued to ask “What did I do to you?” and “What do you want?” But since the two were no longer in view of the vehicle’s dashboard camera, it is hard to see exactly what is happening during that struggle. Next, you can hear the officer use his taser on Jones, at which point Jones begins to run down the street.
Next, multiple other police cars arrived on the scene, which later provided more dash-cam evidence to provide insight into what actually happened.
By the time other cars arrived on the scene, it seems as if Jones was laying on the ground with several police officers standing over him, yelling at him, punching and kicking him, and using tasers on him multiple times. With Jones on the ground, one of the officers shouted “drop his f***** ass, drop his ass!!”, and they opened fire on him, shooting him a total of 23 times.
After the shooting, police can be seen pacing around the body and tampering with the crime scene. Later, it was revealed that the police officers there tried to plant multiple knives on his body and claim that he “had a knife.” However, the officers did such a poor job at covering their tracks while planting the weapon that they could not even enter it as evidence in the case.
One of the officers even went so far as to say that he was stabbed, although it was later found that he was not stabbed, and no knife belonging to Jones was actually found or entered as evidence.
The cover-up didnt stop there, when the police finally released the dash-cam footage it was obviously tampered with, large segments of audio and video were missing from the footage, and the time-stamps did not even match up. Even with the edits, the dash-cam footage does provide a number of clues into what actually took place, including one admission from an officer who said “he wasn’t “f****** doing nothing – so we all shot him”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHEN6WpjLl0#t=46
It is also important to point out the incredible lack of remorse exhibited by the officers in the videos. In one of the videos, after the killing, the officers can be heard casually talking about the weather and about how skoal chewing tobacco is a “man’s cigarette.”
The Martinsburg District Attorney called a Special Grand Jury to hear the evidence against the five officers involved, and as with most police murders, the Grand Jury did not indict the officers.
The family of Jones immediately filed a lawsuit against the city, but were railroaded out of court due to filing technicalities. Now the Jones family is filing for an appeal, and are hoping to raise the funds to get a decent lawyer so they can actually follow through with their case.
You can donate to the family’s legal fund at the following link. Help to get justice for the Jones family by donating and/or sharing this story with others.
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