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Get a link in your mailbox to your weekly NYPD Confidential column as soon as it is published! Click on the button above right on this page — or here — to sign up for this feature. Dead Man WalkingJune 10, 2019 Consider this: What if, as Daniel Pantaleo’s lawyer claimed last week, Eric Garner died not from the NYPD cop’s supposed chokehold but from poor health — specifically obesity. Garner weighed nearly 400 pounds. Michael Graham, the St. Louis medical examiner, testified last week for Pantaleo in his departmental trial, and refuted claims by NYC’s medical examiner’s office which concluded that Garner had died from an NYPD-banned chokehold. Instead, Graham maintained that Garner died from heart problems “exacerbated by his interaction with law enforcement.” Garner had resisted as Pantaleo attempted to arrest him for selling “loosie” cigarettes in Staten Island in July 2014.
As far as expert testimony goes, that’s a wash. Were this a criminal trial, the conflicting testimony might have created reasonable doubt, which could mean Pantaleo’s acquittal. But this is no criminal trial. It is a department trial, where the criteria for conviction or acquittal is “the preponderance of the evidence.” That means that the department — via trial judge Rosemarie Maldonado and NYPD Commissioner Jim O’Neill, who has the final say — will make their determination based on whatever evidence they choose to accept or ignore. Maldonado’s decision is expected in a few weeks. Meanwhile, Pantaleo is a dead man walking. That’s because a cultural revolution with a leftward tilt is afoot in New York City, where rules and values of the past have been upended. |
Tiffany Cabán is a 31-year-old former public defender, endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Cabán has promised to end cash bail, stop criminalizing poverty, and roll back mass incarceration and the war on drugs. “I’m a queer Latina from a working-class family,” is how she describes herself. “People like us are exactly who the system is trying to keep down.” Greg Lasak, the sole candidate who was both a prosecutor and a judge, is trailing. Finally, consider this: We have a mayor who is a true ideologue of the left. He remains silent when his schools chancellor Richard Carranza says he wants to dismantle what he calls “white supremacy culture.” Carranza is the same character who, referring to the large number of Asian-American students who attend the city's elite high schools, made the borderline racist remark: “I don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admissions” to these elite schools. The mayor has also remained silent about that.
Is there any doubt that the mayor wants Pantaleo fired? Is there any doubt but that O’Neill will comply? |
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