Noah Feldman, Columnist

Symbolism Matters in Declining to Prosecute an NYPD Officer

How should we view the decisions the Justice Department made in a prominent Black Lives Matter case?

July 16, 2019 at 7:52 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

A horrifying death.
Photographer: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

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The news on Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Justice will not seek civil rights charges against a New York police officer in the death of Eric Garner sounds like grounds for a straightforward controversy.

On the one hand, civil rights advocates and Black Lives Matter activists will say that the Justice Department failed to follow the evidence that Officer Daniel Pantaleo used excessive force and an illegal chokehold when he attempted to arrest Garner on July 17, 2014. On the other hand, defenders of the officer and members of President Donald Trump’s administration will point out that no charges had been brought against Pantaleo by city or state prosecutors1 — presumably because they did not believe the evidence was strong enough to overcome the officer’s insistence that he did not in fact use an illegal restraint.