Fox News’s star political commentators were completely in sync after news broke Wednesday afternoon that there would be no indictment of the white officer who killed Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who just before his death was arrested for illegally selling cigarettes.
All the primetime bold names at Fox were saddened and, at the very least, puzzled by the New York grand jury’s decision.
Except Sean Hannity.
Hannity began his 10 p.m. EST show saying that what made him “so angry” about the situation is that the Garner incident involved illegally selling cigarettes, a minor crime.
He then took a dive into the psyche of the grand jury. “If you want to understand, though, the grand jury’s situation here,” Hannity began, “nobody in the media has gotten this right. Because it may sound technical, it may sound like it’s semantics: There is a very big distinction between a chokehold and a headlock.”
The police altercation with Garner was caught on video and appears to show several police attempting to bring him to the ground and handcuff him. One officer behind Garner has his arm around Garner’s neck, which was widely described as a chokehold.
“I would not use the term chokehold, as a martial artist student,” Hannity said. “I wouldn’t use that term … while it may sound like a small detail, I want to know how much the jury heard about chokeholds versus headlocks, because a chokehold is illegal. A headlock is not illegal.”
Hannity’s guest, former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, agreed with Hannity that there is a difference but said what happened to Garner did look like a chokehold.
William Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, confirmed the difference between a chokehold (a self-defense measure) and a headlock (a compliance technique) in an email to the Washington Examiner. He noted, however, that he is unfamiliar with the specifics of the Garner case and could not directly comment on it.
Even with the technical difference, though, a medical examiner ruled Garner’s death a homicide.
Elsewhere during Fox’s primetime, Greta Van Susteren, a former defense lawyer, said the video of Garner’s arrest was “stunning.” “When he said, ‘I can’t breathe,’ that would have been a great invitation to stop,” she said.
“I couldn’t agree more,” replied co-host of “The Five” Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former prosecutor.
Bill O’Reilly, Fox’s biggest star, said Garner “did not deserve what happened to him.”
Charles Krauthammer, arguably the brain for conservative thought at Fox, said, “From looking at the video here, the grand jury’s decision is totally incomprehensible.”
