Joe Marino/New York Daily News Staten Island DA Daniel Donovan didn’t include a charge of reckless endangerment for the Eric Garner grand jury to consider against NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo. Prosecutors left off the table a criminal charge that would have allowed a Staten Island grand jury to indict the cop who killed Eric Garner — even if the panel believed the officer didn’t intend to choke him to death, WNBC reported Friday.
It’s called reckless endangerment and all a majority on the grand jury would have needed to do is agree that Officer Daniel Pantaleo’s actions — clearly visible on a horrific cell phone video obtained by The Daily News — figured in Garner’s death.
But they never got the chance.
“District Attorney Daniel Donovan only asked grand jurors to consider manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges,” WNBC reported Friday.
Those charges are harder to get because they imply that the cop knew his actions could result in death or serious injury — and did them anyway.
The report that Donovan did not give the grand jury an option to charge Pantaleo with a less serious crime came two days after New York and the nation was outraged after the panel chose not to indict Pantaleo.
They let the 29-year-old officer walk despite damning footage that showed the officer using the banned chokehold and a Medical Examiner’s determination that Garner’s death was a homicide.
Ramsey Orta, the Staten Islander who took the violent video, told The News on Thursday the grand jury was rigged and the panelists barely asked him any questions — and when they did it was more about Garner than Pantaleo.
“Nothing pertaining to the cop choking him,” Orta said.
Rodney Lee, manager of the Tompkinsville beauty supply shop in front of which Garner was killed on July 17, told The News he too was barely asked any questions.
Joe Marino/New York Daily News Ramsey Orta, who videotaped the Garner chokehold, told the Daily News Thursday that the grand jury was rigged and disinterested. “They all treated us like we were dumb, like didn’t know nothing,” he said.
Donovan’s office, citing state confidentiality laws, declined to discuss the WNBC report or the claims by Orta and Lee.
But Donovan, the lone Republican among the city’s five district attorneys, has defended the grand jury proceedings as thorough and fair — even as thousands of demonstrators in New York City and across the nations have denounced the decision.
The Justice Department, at the urging of Garner’s grieving family and their legions of supporters, is conducting its own investigation into the Garner killing.
The new developments came after:
- More than 200 people were arrested after a second night of noisy but largely non-violent protests in the city.
- New York City’s top cop insisted Mayor de Blasio did not throw the NYPD under the bus, a charge that was leveled at Hizzoner by PBA chief Patrick Lynch.
“This mayor has been strongly, strongly supportive of the police,” Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Bratton pointed out that de Blasio devoted $200 million to police training and equipment - money the department didn’t get in previous years.
“I’m very friendly with Pat,” Bratton added in an interview with FOX Business News.
“I have very good relations with our unions, the cops here do an extraordinary job. Pat is speaking both on his own behalf, his own personal beliefs, he has two sons who are New York City police officers.”
On Thursday, Lynch said de Blasio’s remarks — particularly about warning his bi-racial son Dante to be wary of police — was a slap in the face to the NYPD.
Bratton also said some of the criticism hurled at police is unfair.
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images 
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images 
James Keivom/New York Daily News 
Kena Betancur/Getty Images 
Kena Betancur/Getty Images 
“The police, they’re being used as the whipping boy, if you will for a much larger societal issues that we’re not ready or willing to grapple with because of the huge economic cost to address it,” Bratton said.
New York protesters were not alone. Similar scenes played out coast to coast.
In San Francisco, protesters lay down in the street, blocking city traffic. In Oakland, several dozen protesters walked the streets shouting “No justice! No peace! Jail the racist police!”
In Chicago, cops thwarted protesters who tried to march onto Soldier Field, where the Chicago Bears were being trounced by the Dallas Cowboys.
In Washington, protesters marched close to the Ellipse where holiday revelers — including President Obama and his family — celebrated the lighting of the national Christmas tree.
The killing of Garner and the outrage that followed drew comparisons to the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. — another black man killed by a white cop.
Gov. Cuomo said the view that blacks and whites are treated differently in the American justice system - regardless of its correctness - is a real problem.
“If that is the perception, you have a problem anyway,” Cuomo said on the “Today” show Friday. “We’ve been discussing whether or not it's a reality - a grand jury, if they found it, if it's guilty - but the problem is the perception itself even if it wasn't the reality.”
In August, more than a dozen state lawmakers asked Cuomo to take the Garner case out of Donovan’s hands and appoint a special prosecutor. He refused.
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