Fired cop Daniel Pantaleo will sue New York Police Commissioner James O’Neill in an attempt to get his job back.
Attorney Stuart London said Monday that Pantaleo intends to appeal O’Neill’s decision and will continue fighting for his job despite being fired for placing Eric Garner in a chokehold that contributed to his 2014 death.
Pantaleo will reportedly file the lawsuit under Article 78 of the state Civil Practice Law and Rules, London said.

NYPD fires Officer Daniel Pantaleo in chokehold death of Eric Garner

The law gives people the opportunity to appeal decisions by government officials on grounds that they were ‘arbitrary and capricious’.
London said Pantaleo had been promised a pension for his 13 years but that police brass later reneged on those assurances.
If Pantaleo’s legal team wins, he would be reinstated to the NYPD and paid damages for lost wages.

New York Police Commissioner James O’Neill [photo], announced the firing of officer Daniel Pantaleo Monday afternoon

Officer Daniel Pantaleo restrains Eric Garner  in ‘chokehold , [photo], until he expired 

Daniel Pantaleo [photo], was fired on Monday from the NYPD over the death of Eric Garner five years ago. He was judged to have used an illegal chokehold in restraint

Early Monday afternoon, O’Neill announced the firing of Pantaleo who used a deadly chokehold while arresting Garner.
The decision has angered fellow cops, and a statement by Police Benevolent Association [PBA], president Patrick Lynch said O’Neill ‘has chosen to cringe in fear of the anti-police extremists, rather than standing up for New Yorkers who want a functioning police department.’


O’Neill’s decision came after weeks of deliberating whether or not to accept NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Trials Rosemarie Maldonado’s recommendation that Pantaleo be fired for using a chokehold on Garner that had been banned since 1993.
The commissioner said it was clear that Pantaleo ‘can no longer effectively serve as a New York City police officer’.
Meanwhile, Garner’s daughter, Emerald Snipes-Garner, branded Pantaleo a ‘murderer’ as she thanked O’Neill, for his decision to fire the officer during a press conference held at the National Action Network in Harlem, New York.
‘You finally made a decision that should’ve been made five years ago,’ Snipes-Garner said while wearing a shirt with the word ‘murderer’ emblazoned across a photo of Pantaleo.

And Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr told a crowd outside One Police Plaza in New York: ‘I am not stopping this fight. You lost your job, but I lost my son.’
During O’Neill’s press conference, he said that ‘none of us can take back our decisions, especially when they lead to the death of another human being’.
The commissioner said he knows ‘some will be angry’ but ‘it’s my responsibility as police commissioner to look out for the city and most certainly the police officers’.
When asked whether Mayor Bill de Blasio forced his hand, O’Neill, who did defend Pantaleo’s record as an officer, said the dismissal was his choice.
‘This is the decision that the police commissioner makes,’ he said, calling Garner’s death an ‘irreversible tragedy’ that ‘must have a consequence’.


Pantaleo had previously been on desk duty since he was seen in widely viewed cellphone videos using a banned chokehold on Garner on a Staten Island sidewalk during an attempted arrest. Police believed Garner was selling loose, untaxed cigarettes.

 

He spoke of consistent ‘criminal activity’ and multiple 911 calls about thefts and robberies in the area leading up to the incident.
‘That was the situation in Tompkinsville Park when Officer Pantaleo was sent with another officer to conduct an enforcement operation,’ O’Neill said.
O’Neill said Garner ‘refused to cooperate with the arrest’, pointing out that the ‘video also makes clear that Officer Pantaleo’s original efforts to take Mr Garner into custody were appropriate’.
‘Every time I watched the video, I said to myself, dozens of times: “Don’t do it. Don’t do it.” I said that about the decisions made by both Officer Pantaleo and Mr. Garner,’ he said.
O’Neill then also said he might have made ‘similar mistakes’ in Pantaleo’s situation.
Addressing the firing during a press conference at the National Action Network, Rev Al Sharpton said the decision came ‘five years too late’.
‘Five years of misery and pain that will never end for this family,’ he added.
‘We are relieved but we are not celebratory because Pantaleo will go home a terminated man but this family had to go to a funeral,’ Sharpton said.
Sharpton continued: ‘I take issue with one thing that the commissioner said. I do take issue when it is said that “if I was a policeman I would be mad about this”.’

The activist was referring to the moment O’Neill said that if was still an officer of the NYPD he would be angry at any commissioner’s decision choosing to fire Pantaleo.
‘If I were still a cop, I would be mad at me,’ O’Neill said of his own decision.
Sharpton posed the question: ‘What kind of policeman do we have that would be angry that policy was violated?’
‘They ought to say what I was trained to do is what I’m expected to do. You cannot have a set of rules for citizens and a different set of rules for policemen. They must follow policy and they should not be mad about it,’ Sharpton continued.
But several officers are angry, evident by the statement from the Police Benevolent PBA, and Lynch, who has remained an active voice in defense of Pantaleo’s actions.
‘The damage is already done. The NYPD will remain rudderless and frozen, and Commissioner O’Neill will never be able to bring it back. Now it is time for every PO in this city to make their own choice,’ Lynch said.
Lynch said O’Neill ‘has chosen politics and his own self-interest over the police officers he claims to lead’.
He went on to say that O’Neill ‘will wake up tomorrow to discover that the cop-haters are still not satisfied, but it will be too late’.
Garner’s repeated dying cries of ‘I can’t breathe,’ widely heard on social media, became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, which protests what its leaders call the disparate use of excessive force against black people across the US.
A Staten Island grand jury and the US Department of Justice both declined to prosecute in one of a series of cases in which a law enforcement officer faced no criminal liability for killing an unarmed black man.
New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, has previously declined to say whether he believed Pantaleo should lose his job but has been promising ‘justice’ to the Garner family. 

‘The pain was because we all watched a human being die before our eyes on a video… a man who should be still alive today.
‘The fear was because for a long time people wondered if we would be left without justice. The place that we had turned, for generations to, a place that was synonymous with making things right failed us.
‘The US Department of Justice, absent and unwilling to act even to come to any decision for five long years.
‘But today, we have finally seen justice done. Today, we saw the NYPD’s own disciplinary process act fairly and impartially.’
De Blasio then said he hopes that O’Neill’s decision would bring some ‘small measure of closure and peace to the Garner family’.
The mayor encouraged the city to move forward and continue to create a better society.

 

‘I see this as a sacred mission we all must take on. We must devote ourselves to this simple goal: No person, no family, and no community should ever go through the agony that we’ve all experienced over these last years.
‘It should never happen again, in this city or this country. As the only goal that is acceptable, let this be the last tragedy. We all have to confront our history honestly and it’s not a history that we can always be proud of.
‘But I know that the NYPD of today is a different institution than it was just a few years ago. I know that the NYPD has changed profoundly. I know members of the NYPD learned the lessons of this tragedy. They acted on it; they did something about it.
‘It is a beginning but we have a lot more to do,’ de Blasio said.
‘I want to say to our police officers: “You made a good and noble choice to protect others…we need you and we need you to build deeper trust with all of the people you serve”.
‘Because that is not only the right thing to do, it is the best way to keep everyone safe,’ he said.
Pantaleo’s lawyer has insisted the officer used a reasonable amount of force and didn’t mean to hurt Garner.
O’Neill’s decision comes two weeks after Maldonado made her recommendation on August 2. On Sunday, the full text of her opinion show that Internal Affairs investigators interviewed Pantaleo on December 8, 2014.

The transcript of that interrogation was introduced during his disciplinary trial in place of Pantaleo’s direct testimony.
During their questioning, the investigators asked Pantaleo to describe the chokehold maneuver that had been banned by the NYPD in 1993 due to its lethal risks.
Pantaleo defined the action as a move where ‘you use your forearm, grasped with the other hand, and you pull back with your forearm onto the windpipe, preventing him from breathing’.
Even after being forced to watch the video of himself wrapping his forearm around Garner’s neck before grasping one hand with the other and pulling back, Pantaleo maintained that he did not choke the Staten Island father-of-six.
‘No, I did not,’ Pantaleo said when asked by investigators if he’d applied a chokehold.
That explanation didn’t make sense to Maldonado who in the 46-page document, described Pantaleo’s chokehold denial as ‘implausible and self-serving’.
‘I found [Pantaleo’s] uncorroborated hearsay statements explaining his actions to be untruthful,’ Maldonado wrote.
‘First, I found [Pantaleo] to be disingenuous when he viewed the video and denied using a chokehold, even though his actions were completely consistent with his own erroneous and restrictive definition of the Patrol Guide prohibition.’

‘Specifically, [Pantaleo’s] self-serving version of events failed to satisfactorily account for the uncontroverted medical evidence of hemorrhaging in Mr. Garner’s anterior neck muscles and thus tribunal’s own assessment of the video evidence capturing [Pantaleo] clasping his hands and pressing his forearm against Mr. Garner’s neck…
‘This tribunal finds that Respondent used a prohibited chokehold as defined by the Patrol Guide during this physical encounter,’ Maldonado continued.
‘The preponderance of the credible evidence established that Respondent’s use of a prohibited chokehold was reckless and constituted a gross deviation from the standard of conduct established for a New York Police officer.’

Pantaleo was suspended from the force on August 2 after Maldonado’s ruling was issued.
He spent five years on modified desk duty and received multiple pay raises, including a 14 per cent salary increase in 2016 to an annual total ofnearly $120,000 including overtime.