Racial tension clouded the holiday atmosphere across the country, with the New York City grand jury’s refusal to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner. Many cities in the United States witnessed protests and uprisings, with people rallying with Garner’s last words “I can’t breathe,” reminiscent of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
Both the media and those who watched Garner’s death, captured in detail on video, formulated the idea that Garner was treated in a racist manner. The media latched onto the image of a white police officer assaulting a black man, with presumable sympathy to Garner. But few investigated further into the context leading up to the confrontation.
Keep in mind that the crime Eric Garner was alleged to have committed, selling individual cigarettes on street, which is illegal according to New York state laws.
As long as selling individual cigarettes on the street is in violation of state laws, police officers confronting alleged law breakers is perfectly normal. However, Pantaleo’s actions may have exceeded necessary means, because the use of chokeholds is, in fact, illegal for New York City police officers. But as Yale Law professor Stephen L. Carter pointed out, “the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.” Thus, one should not expect armed police to act gently in any resisting confrontation.
What is more evident in the Garner case than racial implications, however, is the concept of over-criminalization in the United States today. In America’s formative years, only a few acts were criminalized, such as murder, theft and treason. Today, federal law alone includes more than 3,000 felonies, fewer than half of which are Federal Criminal Code, according to legal scholar Douglas Husak, author of Overcriminalization: The Limits of Criminal Law. The speed of passing new laws in both federal and state level legislature exceeds that of repealing outdated laws, so America’s criminal system has been expanding dramatically for decades and continues to grow.
With new laws enacted, excessive punishments follow suit. Husak showed some astonishing statistics of criminal punishments: 1 in 138 residents were incarcerated in 2005. An estimated 1 in 20 children born in the United States is destined to serve time in a federal or state prison at some point in his or her lifetime. Minorities are disproportionately represented behind bars, as about 12.5 percent of all black men aged 25 to 29 are in jail, compared with 1.7 percent of similarly aged white males, according to Marina Adshade, author of Dollars and Sex: How Economics Sex and Love.
At the state level, over-criminalization is more aggressive than at the federal level. Many state laws criminalize behaviors that most people consider perfectly reasonable. For example, giving out cooking and dietary advice to friends might violate state licensing laws in North Carolina. In 2012, the North Carolina Board of Dietetics and Nutrition warned Steve Cooksey that he might face criminal charges because he wrote blogs about his personal experience on nutrition and diet, being seen as “unlicensed practice of dietetics.” Cooksey claimed on his blog that he managed his diabetes through exercise and a paleo diet rich in meats and vegetables.
Though racial tensions played a role, the current state of over-criminalization is the real root of corruption that would eventually lead to Eric Garner’s death. Americans may soon realize that the Garner case was a tragic result of over-criminalizing petty state laws rather than an intentional assault on race. If lawmakers are unable to stop the current trend of bloated law books, the public will likely see more confrontations in years to come.
