Movie Review/Ed Rampell

What if Cops Were Held Accountable?

New film, ‘American Trial,’ imagines what might have happened if the cop who strangled Eric Garner to death faced charges in court.

In “American Trial: The Eric Garner Story,” black activist Netta Elzie says, “I don’t even know what the probable cause was for Eric Garner being arrested.”

Whatever the reason for his apprehension, the July 17, 2014, altercation between a team of New York Police Department officers and Garner, a 350-something pound, asthmatic African American, resulted in his death.

There never was a criminal trial for officer Daniel Pantaleo, who a federal grand jury decided not to indict in December 2014, even though a departmental hearing found him guilty of applying a chokehold on Garner in violation of NYPD regulations. The police force fired Pantaleo for these transgressions in August 2019, more than five years after the fact.

“I can’t breathe”—Garner’s dying words—became a protest chant for the Black Lives Matter movement and, more recently, rallies on behalf of George Floyd, who died in the custody of Minneapolis police. And now the Garner family is finally having its day in court—sort of.

Producer/director Roee Messinger’s 101-minute motion picture synthesizes elements of nonfiction and fiction to depict the case against Pantaleo. Messinger uses news and archival footage as well as original interviews with experts, innovatively intercut with a staged jury trial of Pantaleo.

The media clips include footage of Pantaleo and other NYPD officers as they swarmed Garner and wrestled him face down to the pavement on a Staten Island street. He had been selling “loosies”—untaxed, individually sold cigarettes.

“American Trial” includes testimony from Reverend Al Sharpton, President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. LeBron James appears in court with other Los Angeles Lakers — including the late Kobe Bryant — in T-shirts bearing Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” in an act of solidarity.

Elzie and fellow organizer DeRay McKesson, who both emerged out of the protests at Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown, another unarmed black man, less than a month after Garner’s death. And attorney Alan Dershowitz, who recently defended President Trump during his Senate impeachment trial, appears to say that the matter involving Garner was “so trivial he never should have been arrested.” The offense he committed was worthy of a ticket, at most, Dershowitz opines.

The most compelling personality in American Trial is Garner’s widow, Esaw Snipes-Garner, who was married to Garner for 26 years; the couple had four children. Snipes-Garner plays herself during the film’s courtroom sequences, chafing at limitations on her ability to tell her own version of events on the witness stand. In real life, she ended up settling a lawsuit over her husband’s death out of court. Keep your eyes peeled during the credits sequence, revealing how she is still traumatized by the tragedy her family has endured.

The legal proceedings, shot inside what appears to be an actual courtroom, are entirely fictionalized, as Pantaleo never stood trial. Nevertheless these scenes have a feeling of authenticity. Onscreen, Pantaleo is tried for second-degree manslaughter and first-degree strangulation as the film probes whether or not the officer killed Eric Garner with a chokehold prohibited by NYPD rules.

Yet in what the press notes call “an unscripted courtroom drama,” there are no histrionics before the bench, such as witnesses confessing their guilt on the stand, a la Perry Mason. But aficionados of television procedurals will likely enjoy the usual objections, whether sustained or overruled.

Taking a page from Italian Neo-Realism, the prosecutors in the film are played by people with civilian and military prosecutorial experience; the defense counsels are played by actual lawyers; and the expert witnesses called to testify are played by real-life medical examiners. The judge is an attorney in real life.

The film has only one accredited actor, Bronx-born Anthony Altieri, who portrays Pantaleo.

Other “What if?” trials that never happened have been staged for the screen, including several imagining Lee Harvey Oswald’s court drama for the assassination of JFK. But “American Trial” is unique in that, while 12 non-actors sit in the movie’s jury box, the verdict is interactively decided by viewers watching at home.

Six years after Garner’s death, “American Trial: The Eric Garner Story” remains all too relevant as unarmed Blacks are still dying at the hands of armed police and vigilantes. George Floyd’s death caused by Minneapolis police officers callously kneeling on his neck, back, etc., for about nine minutes causing him to die while gasping he couldn’t breathe is all too eerily reminiscent of the Garner tragedy at the hands of the pigs. The unfolding Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor calamities in Georgia and Kentucky six years after Garner was strangled reminds us that racial injustices perpetrated by white vigilantes and police still run rampant. And that’s a fact that should choke us all up, and spur us on in the continuing social justice struggle against racism and excessive use of force.

Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at progressive.org.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2020

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