Why did a grand jury not demand charges in the death of Eric Garner? Homicide - First lets stop with the bullshit that the medical examiner said it was homicide and the jury did not. This is simply not true. The medical examiner ruled it homicide because it was not suicide, accident, natural, or undetermined. To a medical examiner, there are only five choices. Homicide just means someone else did something which led to the persons death. You break into my home, I shoot you dead, the medical examiner rules it a homicide. This does NOT mean I committed homicide because now you have just stepped into a whole different use of the word. In New York, to be guilty of criminally negligent homicide, which is the easiest to convict, a person has to fail: “to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk” that Garner would die from his actions, and that failure was “a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe in the situation.” In the United States, we have a tradition of not convicting people based on laws that have not been written yet. So lets talk about this in the frame of the law, the one the grand jury applied. Despite the department later saying choke holds should not be used, the officer was taught to use them in training. He was instructed and shown how to use them without causing death. That being that, I can certainly see how he would not have perceived a substantial and unjustifiable risk. He was told by the department that all that would happen is the guy would go nap. That there choke hold is also called the sleeper hold. It is that second part that gets me, but again I am not sure the officer is responsible for a gross deviation from the standard of care. It gets me because I think it was failure to provide medical care which brought about the mans death. That would lead me to want to charge all the officers. Ah but there is the thing, from what I can tell none of the officers tried to restore the mans breathing or keep blood flowing if his heart had stopped (not sure when it did). So we have a gaggle of police officers and none does cpr. It seems the standard of care is to let the man die. I am thinking it is the law that is at fault. I think it ought to be different in that it must insist that if a person creates the threat to human life, they must take action to save that human life. Seems like a very reasonable way to fix the law.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 12:39:35 +0000
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