Dec. 22--The video that rocked the world in July 2014 showed a group of New York City police officers piling onto Eric Garner, who had resisted when they tried to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes outside the Staten Island Ferry Terminal.
Recorded by a bystander with a cellphone and posted to YouTube, the video showed one officer wrapping his arm around Garner's neck and hauling him to the ground. As other officers held his head to the sidewalk, Garner complained, "I can't breathe." He lost consciousness and died an hour later.
Garner's death -- blamed on a police chokehold, compression of his chest and pre-existing health problems -- was ruled a homicide. But a grand jury declined to indict the officer who executed the chokehold, and streets erupted in protest all over America.
The grand jury did its work behind closed door, leaving the public to guess about why the jurors took a pass. Many people blame the prosecutor's built-in conflict of interest.
Police officers are a prosecutor's day-to-day crime-fighting allies. They do the investigative legwork on which criminal cases are built. They can also be an important constituency at election time. So when a prosecutor has to decide whether to charge a cop with a crime, it gets tricky -- or it looks tricky, which is just as bad. It undermines public confidence in what is almost always a highly charged decision.
Ask Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez. She charged Officer Jason Van Dyke with first-degree murder in the October 2014 fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald. But it took her 13 months, and it would have taken longer if a judge hadn't forced her hand by ordering the release of the video that rocked the world this November. Those images, shot by a police dashboard camera, showed Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times.
Critics say Alvarez slow-rolled the case. They want a special prosecutor to take over.
In Illinois, that's up to the judge assigned to the case. Currently, the defense or prosecution must request a special prosecutor and convince a judge that it's necessary. Beginning Jan. 1, the judge can initiate the process without a request from either side. But it's a case-by-case call.
The uproar over the Garner case prompted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to issue an executive order assigning the state attorney general to handle cases in which police kill civilians.
Some New York prosecutors have pushed back against the notion that they can't be trusted to bring charges against police. But it can cut both ways: In Baltimore, it was the police union calling for a special prosecutor when State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby bypassed a grand jury and charged six officers -- four of them with homicide -- after Freddie Gray suffered a fatal injury in their custody.
