Carte Blanche

And in this case...license to kill.

“I became a police officer to help people and to protect those who can’t protect themselves. It is never my intention to harm anyone and I feel very bad about the death of Mr. Garner. My family and I include him and his family in our prayers and I hope that they will accept my personal condolences for their loss,” [NYPD Officer Daniel] Pantaleo said in a statement, according to NBC New York’s Steven Bognar.

  IBTimes

I'm guessing not.

I wonder if he feels bad about these incidents:

Pantaleo was sued twice in the past for alleged racially motivated misconduct while on the job. Two black men accused him in 2012 of subjecting them to an illegal strip search in broad daylight. Pantaleo purportedly “tapped” each man’s testicles during the search, which he claimed was a bid to discover any contraband, the Daily News reported. The suit was settled last January.

In a second lawsuit, a man named Rylawn Walker accused a group of NYPD officers that included Pantaleo of arresting him despite the fact that he was “committing no crime at the time and was not acting in a suspicious manner” and of including misleading data on a police report to justify the arrest, the Staten Island Advance reported. Charges against the man were ultimately dismissed.

According to Jason Leventhal, Collins and Rice's lawyer, Pantaleo had falsely claimed that he saw crack and heroin in plain view, on the vehicle's back seat, allowing the officers to arrest everyone in the car. Wilson admitted the drugs were in his pocket, not in plain view, when he ultimately took a plea deal, Leventhal said.

Collins and Rice each received $15,000 settlements from the city, Leventhal said.

"One of the fundamental, most important things a police officer needs to do is to tell the truth," Leventhal said. "He has no right to strip-search anyone in the middle of the street."

  silive

Apparently, he can do any damned thing he wants to do.

Leventhal, who regularly handles civil rights cases lodged against the NYPD, said that based on the Garner video, Pantaleo ignored a "life-or-death rule of the NYPD patrol guide" prohibiting chokeholds, and ignored the department's use-of-force continuum.

"You don't just immediately jump on the guy's neck and choke him," Leventhal said. "I think it's a depraved indifference to human life to choke him like that."

He’s not going on trial. As I said,…..