The only person indicted over Eric Garner's death was the guy who filmed it
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Version 0 of 1. Remarkably, the video of unarmed black man Eric Garner being choked to death by Daniel Pantaleo didn't lead to the indictment of the police officer, yet the man who filmed it is now in prison. The world was stunned today as a Staten Island grand jury decided Pantaleo did not act improperly when he placed Garner, whom he believed to be selling untaxed cigarettes, in a chokehold which caused him to plead "I can't breathe" before dying shortly after. The incident was caught on camera and quickly went viral. The man who filmed it, Ramsey Orta, was arrested in August a month after the tragedy for allegedly concealing a handgun in a teenage accomplace's waistband outside a New York hotel. He testified that police brought the charges in retaliation to his dissemination of the Eric Garner video, but the grand jury ignored him, indicting him on multiple firearm charges. Garner was the latest in a series of killings of unarmed black men by white police officers in the US this year that have not seen prosecutions, following on from Michael Brown whose death caused riots in Ferguson, Missouri. It is incredibly rare for a grand jury not to return an indictment (according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, of the 162,000 federal cases US attorneys prosecuted in 2010 grand juries only declined to return an indictment in 11 of them), but the data tells a very different story when it is police officers in the dock. |