Anger at chokehold death crosses political lines

WASHINGTON – Although the decision not to indict a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., divided the political right and left along traditional lines, a number of prominent conservatives have joined liberals in condemning the chokehold death of an unarmed black man by a white New York City police officer.

Several Republican and conservative commentators said that while there were conflicting accounts in the Ferguson shooting, a video showing the New York officer choking Eric Garner presented a clearer case of police abuse despite a grand jury's decision Wednesday not to issue an indictment.

"This is not Ferguson, Missouri," Andrew P. Napolitano, the former judge and longtime Fox News analyst, said on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. "This is not somebody wrestling for your gun. This is not where you shoot or be shot at. This is choking to death" a person "whose only crime was selling cigarettes without collecting taxes on them. This does not call for deadly force by any stretch of the imagination."

Andrew C. McCarthy, a National Review writer and author of a book advocating the impeachment of President Obama, wrote that the New York grand jury's decision was "more difficult to justify than the St. Louis grand jury's vote against filing homicide charges against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown."

He said he admired the New York police force. "But I also know, as good cops know, that there is a difference between resisting arrest by not cooperating, as Garner was doing on Staten Island, and resisting arrest by violent assaults and threats of harm, as Michael Brown did in Ferguson."

Garner, 43, was being arrested on a charge of selling loose cigarettes in July when Officer Daniel Pantaleo, 29, put his arm around the man's throat. Pantaleo told the grand jury that he did not intend to choke Garner and never thought Garner was in mortal danger.

But a widely watched video captured by a mobile telephone camera showed Garner, his head pressed down on the sidewalk, crying out, "I can't breathe. I can't breathe." An autopsy by the city's medical examiner called his death a homicide resulting from the chokehold and the compression of his chest by police officers. Chokeholds have been banned by the Police Department since 1993.

The grand jury's decision Wednesday not to indict Pantaleo led to protests in New York and elsewhere, with some critics chanting, "I can't breathe." The Justice Department announced that it would open a civil rights inquiry.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a potential Republican presidential candidate, said, "It's hard not to watch that video … and not be horrified by it."

Russell D. Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said on a podcast that "there is no excuse that I can think of for choking a man to death for selling illegal cigarettes. We have it on video with the man pleading for his life. There is no excuse for that I can even contemplate or imagine right now."