The Justice Department has put in place a new team to investigate the death of Eric Garner, a black man killed by police officers in Staten Island, N.Y., in 2014, in an apparent attempt to move the case more quickly toward criminal charges against the two cops.
Garner, 43, died in 2014 after two police officers put him into a chokehold after accusing him of selling untaxed cigarettes. The confrontation was caught on tape, which went viral, and his last words of “I can’t breathe” became a slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The New York Times reported that the case was not progressing very quickly because “federal prosecutors and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials in New York opposed bringing charges,” while the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division believed the evidence was there to charge the officers.
As a result, the FBI team investigating the case has been replaced, and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are also no longer assigned to the case, the Times said.
Evidence in Garner’s death was presented to a grand jury earlier this year, but the panel has yet to vote on it.
