Wednesday’s decision not to indict a New York police officer in the death of Eric Garner followed the decision of a Texas grand jury last month to clear two former officers who violently subdued a woman in custody.
As in Garner’s case, in May 2013 in Texas white officers were recorded on video manhandling a black suspect who had been arrested for a minor offence and did not appear to be offering significant resistance.
Footage from a jail in Jasper, 130 miles north-east of Houston, shows officers Ricky Grissom and Ryan Cunningham grabbing Keyarika Diggles’ hair and thrusting her face-first onto a counter, then forcing her to the floor and dragging her into a cell by her feet.
As the Texas Observer reports, the officers had arrested Diggles earlier in the day for $100 owed on an unpaid traffic ticket, a debt she was paying off in monthly installments. Less than a month later, and after allegations that police had sought to cover up the incident and deflect blame by charging Diggles, then 25, with resisting arrest, the Jasper city council voted to fire both officers and asked the local district attorney to examine the possibility of criminal charges.
Diggles filed a civil lawsuit that alleged she was “the latest victim of Jasper’s long-standing and now escalating racial tension”. The city’s first black police chief was replaced by the newly elected council in the summer of 2012, after less than 18 months on the job.
Earlier this year that former police chief, Rodney Pearson, agreed with the city to an $831,000 settlement of a federal discrimination lawsuit. A year ago, Diggles was awarded $75,000 out of court.
“I’m very surprised. I think it’s appalling that those officers would be no-billed by the grand jury … unfortunately grand jury proceedings are very secretive in nature so there’s very little we know about what transpired within the grand jury,” her lawyer, Cade Bernsen, told the Guardian.
“From my standpoint and the standpoint of many people in the community the video is clear, there’s no question that the force was extremely excessive,” he said.
“It seems to be a pattern of law enforcement personnel not being held accountable in the American grand jury system and it seems disproportionately so when the victim is a minority. It’s just disturbing for those of us that care about the justice system and want to believe in its fairness and transparency.”
He said he found it alarming that after losing his job with the city police department, Cunningham was hired by the Jasper County sheriff’s office several months before the grand jury’s decision.
“I think it sends a terrible message,” he said. He is representing the family of Stanley Leger, an 80-year-old man who was shot dead by police on the front porch of his east Texas home last June in disputed circumstances. A grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot him from 70 yards away using an AR-15 rifle.
Garner was placed in a chokehold by a New York police officer moments before his death. On Wednesday, a law enforcement officer in south Texas resigned a week after video emerged of him restraining a woman with a chokehold in a fast-food restaurant’s parking lot last August.
In the video an officer is seen questioning Lanessa Espinosa, who is filming him, about a fight. When she refuses to provide identification he appears to try to handcuff her. Gary Witherspoon puts his left arm around her neck as she keeps filming.
Witherspoon was an investigator with the Nueces County district attorney’s office. In a statement to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the district attorney, Mark Skurka, said Witherspoon was allowed to resign rather than be fired.
“The termination is a result of his involvement and actions at an incident that took place on 16 August 2014, as well as other employment issues,” Skurka said. “However, during the termination process, Mr. Witherspoon asked for and was allowed to resign.”
Last February a grand jury in El Paso did not indict an officer who in 2013 killed Daniel Saenz, a handcuffed 37-year-old who was strongly resisting a two-man attempt to transfer him from the county jail to a hospital. Video shows officer Jose Flores drawing his gun, rather than his Taser, then shooting Saenz once as he squirms on the ground.
A 2013 Houston Chronicle investigation found that no Houston police officer had been charged for a shooting since 2004 and that officers involved in shootings had been cleared 288 consecutive times by grand juries.
However, in a 2010 incident that attracted widespread attention, four Houston police officers were indicted by a grand jury in relation to the beating of Chad Holley, a 15-year-old burglary suspect who was fleeing police. Holley, who is black, lay flat on the ground in a submissive posture. Four officers then surrounded him. Holley was repeatedly kicked and stomped and one officer punched him five times.
Twelve officers were disciplined and seven were fired, with two reinstated on appeal. The four who were indicted faced misdemeanour charges of official oppression, rather than more severe assault charges.
One officer testified that he did not in fact kick Holley in the head but was performing a rugby move called a “stab step”, which he had learned while trying to pursue a professional career in the sport.
