Daniel Pantaleo: Last News

Last year, director Roee Messinger debuted his film American Trial: The Eric Garner Story at the New York Film Festival, revealing his ambitious project — part documentary, part unscripted history — which imagines what could have happened if a grand jury had indicted NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in Garner's death. Garner died in 2014 after Pantelo placed him in a forbidden chokehold, with his final words, "I can't breathe," caught on video— an eerily similar scenario to the May police killing of George Floyd, who also said “I can’t breathe” as a Minneapolis officer kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for several minutes.

To improve relations with communities and police, NYPD leaders and Black activists joined together in New York City to hand out turkeys for Thanksgiving to a community in Brooklyn on Monday according to reports. Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, was there after making peace with cops after the death of her son.

An intriguing and well-executed attempt to supply something Americans were denied in 2014, Roee Messinger's American Trial: The Eric Garner Story uses non-actors and real community members to imagine a trial that Staten Island grand jurors inexplicably refused to hold: In this conjured reality, unlike our own, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo is indicted for reckless manslaughter and first-degree strangulation in the killing of unarmed New Yorker Eric Garner.

When Eric Garner died back in 2014, it was a tragedy. More than that, it may have been a crime. New York City Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo was notoriously not charged by a Grand Jury on Staten Island with the man’s death. The words “I can’t breathe” from Garner sparked protests and demonstrations nationwide. Now, a half decade later, a film is attempting to right that wrong. American Trial: The Eric Garner Story, is a hybrid work that tries to both serve justice, as well as showcase how the system may well be broken. It’s an ambitious and respectable idea, but it doesn’t quite work as cinema. Available to watch today, it’s an effort that deserves attention, but can’t pull off what it hopes to ultimately achieve.