I Can't Breathe by Matt Taibbi

Author:Matt Taibbi
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

By the afternoon of December 4, the whole country heard the new details Donovan had asked Judge Rooney to release to the public. In the media, this information was mostly presented as proof that Donovan’s investigation had been thorough and fair.

But a few lawyers across New York City were quietly coming to a somewhat different conclusion.

They looked at the summary of the witnesses and exhibits and wondered: What kind of case had Donovan put on, exactly? Why all of those police witnesses? Why so much evidence about training procedures? Had Donovan called witnesses for the prosecution and the defense? If so, why?

Donovan was ostensibly after an indictment, and here he had a homicide, committed in broad daylight, captured on video. Even if the argument was for criminally negligent homicide—accusing Pantaleo of the overzealous use of a banned procedure—the case was not terribly complicated. Hell, the city’s police commissioner had called it a chokehold on live television.

Yet Donovan had put on a case that reminded most criminal lawyers of a white-collar case, or a case involving government corruption, where jurors had to be led through an exhaustive evidentiary trail to see the crime.

That clearly wasn’t the case here. There was a video of the victim being killed. So what happened?

—

See if this story sounds familiar:

A black male is killed by a police officer on the streets of New York in front of many witnesses. The murder triggers furious protests in the African American community. A white district attorney somberly pledges to investigate and convenes a special grand jury to consider charges against the officer.

But the grand jury takes an unusually long time to do its job. Dozens of witnesses are called to give more than a thousand pages of testimony in multiple secret sessions, facts we know because the district attorney himself goes out of his way to show the public what a thorough investigation he’s conducted.

Still, there are whispers throughout that key prosecution witnesses and/or evidence is being excluded. And the city’s black citizens are infuriated, if not exactly surprised, when the grand jury finally comes to a decision months after the homicide: no indictment.

This was the story of fifteen-year-old James Powell, a black teenager who was shot to death in Harlem on the morning of July 16, 1964, fifty years before the death of Eric Garner.

Powell had been involved in a confrontation with a white building superintendent who had threatened to turn a hose on him and two of his friends (and may have said something to the effect of, “Dirty niggers, I’ll wash you clean”). When Powell chased after him, the superintendent fled, but an off-duty cop named Thomas Gilligan shot and killed Powell, claiming he saw him carrying a knife.

Two days after this incident, the city of New York exploded in protests. A three-day battle between police and protesters in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and other neighborhoods ensued, leaving one dead and hundreds injured.

After the Powell shooting in New York in that summer of 1964, New York County district attorney Frank Hogan convened a special grand jury to consider charges against the police officer.

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