The Death Penalty for Selling Loose Cigarettes

Over the last three years, while working on a book about the criminal justice gap that ended up being called The Divide, I spent a lot of time with people like Eric Garner. There's a shabby little courthouse at 346 Broadway in lower Manhattan that's set up as the place you go to be sentenced and fined for the kind of ticket Staten Island cops were probably planning on giving Garner.

I sat in that courtroom over and over again for weeks and listened to the stories.

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I met one guy, named Andre Finley, who kept showing up to court in an attempt to talk his way into jail as a way out of the $100 fine he'd got for riding a bike on a sidewalk in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He couldn't afford the hundred bucks.

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I met a woman who had to hire a sitter so she could spend all day in court waiting to be fined for drinking wine on her own front porch.

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In Andrew [Brown]'s case, police thought the sight of two black men standing in front of a project tower at 1 a.m. was suspicious and stopped them. In reality, Andrew was listening to music on headphones with a friend on his way home after a long shift driving a casino shuttle. When he balked at being stopped, just like Garner balked, cops wrote him up for "obstructing" a street completely empty of pedestrians, and the court demanded 50 bucks for his crime.

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[T]he psychic impact of [Broken Windows police] policies on the massive pool of [the non-criminals] in the target neighborhoods is a rising sense of being seriously pissed off. They're tired of being manhandled and searched once a week or more for riding bikes the wrong way down the sidewalk (about 25,000 summonses a year here in New York), smoking in the wrong spot, selling loosies, or just "obstructing pedestrian traffic," a.k.a. walking while black.

This is exactly what you hear Eric Garner complaining about in the last moments of his life. "Every time you see me, you want to mess with me," he says. "It stops today!"

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News commentators like the New York Post's Bob McManus ("Blame Only the Man Who Tragically Decided to Resist"), predictably in full-on blame-the-victim mode, are telling readers that the mistake made by Eric Garner was resisting the police in a single moment of obstinacy over what admittedly was not a major offense, but a crime nonetheless. McManus writes:

He was on the street July 17, selling untaxed cigarettes one at a time — which, as inconsequential as it seems, happens to be a crime.

The press and the people who don't live in these places want you to focus only on the incidents in question. It was technically a crime! Annoying, but he should have complied! His fault for dying – and he was a fat guy with asthma besides!

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A ferry ride away from Staten Island, on Wall Street, the pure unmolested freedom to fleece whoever you want is considered the sacred birthright of every rake with a briefcase.

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[If] Eric Garner had been selling naked credit default swaps instead of cigarettes – if in other words he'd set up a bookmaking operation in which passersby could bet on whether people made their home mortgage payments or companies paid off their bonds – the police by virtue of a federal law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act would have been barred from even approaching him.

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The counter-argument to all this is that the police are sent where there's the most crime. But that argument doesn't hold up for long in a city that not only has recently become the unpunished economic corruption capital of the Western world – it's also a place where white professionals on the Upper East and West Sides can have their coke and weed safely home-delivered with their Chinese food, while minorities in Bed-Stuy and Harlem are catching real charges and jail time for the same thing.

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[Y]ou can't send hundreds of thousands of people to court every year on broken-taillight-type misdemeanors and expect people to sit still while yet another coroner-declared homicide goes unindicted.

  Matt Taibbi: Rolling Stone

Of course, that indeed HAS been working for a very long time. A very long time.  It stopped for Eric Garner.