The Dept. of Justice has re-assigned a number of FBI agents involved in the investigation of the July 2014 death of Eric Garner. Police confronted the 43-year-old Garner for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes on Staten Island when the attack occurred. A video of the attack shows NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo using an illegal chokehold maneuver to subdue Garner, who can be heard saying “I can’t breathe.”
Federal authorities have been investigating whether officers violated Mr. Garner’s civil rights in his fatal encounter with the police. But the case had been slowed by a dispute because federal prosecutors and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials in New York opposed bringing charges, while prosecutors with the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department in Washington argued there was clear evidence to do so.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, who as the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York oversaw the beginning of the federal inquiry before her appointment to Washington, has been considering for months how to proceed.
In recent weeks, the F.B.I. agents who have been investigating the case were replaced with agents from outside New York, according to five federal officials in New York and Washington. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are no longer assigned to the case. It is not clear whether civil rights prosecutors from Washington will work alone in presenting evidence to a grand jury in Brooklyn and in trying the case if charges are eventually brought.
A New York state grand jury declined to bring charges against Pantaleo in December of 2014. That action energized nationwide protests already occurring over the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and other young black men elsewhere. Justice Dept. lawyers in New York and Washington, DC, have disagreed over whether to charge Pantaleo with violating Garner’s civil rights, hence the re-assignment of the prosecutors, according to sources quoted by the New York Times.