16 Time Sept. 2–9, 2019
Garner’s death might be the most
notorious of the cases. On July 16, fed-
eral prosecutors announced they would
not bring civil rights charges against
Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who held
Garner down as the 43-year-old re-
peatedly gasped, “I can’t breathe.” A
grand jury had also declined to indict
him. For five years, Pantaleo collected
a salary of $85,000 on desk duty until
the police commissioner fired him on
Aug. 19. “You finally made a decision
that should have been made five years
ago,” Garner’s daughter Emerald Snipes
Garner said.
What the Knowltons are going
through is very different from what
Garner’s family endured, and what the
families of the mostly black and His-
panic individuals killed in use-of-force
incidents have experienced. The Knowl-
tons know their loved one wasn’t tar-
geted because of race—Mary Knowlton
was white, as is the officer—and she was
not assumed to be committing a crime.
Her sons didn’t grow up with the wari-
ness toward law enforcement shared by
many young men of color, which Steve
Knowlton, a Realtor in Cocoa Beach,
Fla., acknowledges. “This is far beyond
anything I could ever imagine could
happen to us,” he says. But after all this
time, they share something with those
other families : a loss of faith in a system
that is supposed to protect them.
When officers are indicted, convic-
tions are rare. Of the 104 nonfederal
law-enforcement officers arrested for
murder or manslaughter for fatal on-
duty shootings since 2005, only 36 have
been convicted of a crime, says crimi-
nologist Philip Stinson, who was a po-
lice officer in New Hampshire in the
1980s. By comparison, of the 217 people
charged with murder and manslaugh-
ter in the nation’s 75 largest counties in
May 2009 alone, 70% were convicted of
murder or other felonies, according to
the most recent data from the Bureau of
Justice Statistics. Even when officers are
convicted, they’re often found guilty of
lesser offenses and receive more lenient
sentences than civilians convicted of the
same crimes, according to researchers.
Lawyers involved in prosecuting po-
lice say there are several factors at play
in these cases, including the power-
ful unions that often represent policemary KnowlTon was 73 years old
when she was shot to death by a police
officer demonstrating the perils of his
job. The officer, Lee Coel, was playing
the “bad guy,” and Knowlton was se-
lected to play a cop during the exercise
in Punta Gorda, Fla., in 2016. Instead of
firing blanks as the retired librarian ap-
proached him, Coel accidentally shot
her with live bullets, his lawyer says.
“She goes down, and no one knows
if she’s pretending,” says one of her two
sons, Steve Knowlton, 53. “Then they
flipped her over.”
Knowlton bled out from her abdo-
men and left elbow in the Punta Gorda
police department’s park-
ing lot. She died about an
hour later at a hospital. “It
just feels like our souls got
ripped out of our chest,”
her son says.
August marked the third
anniversary of Knowlton’s
death, but Coel, 31, has yet to
stand trial on a manslaughter
charge and is free on bond.
He remained on the job for
seven months after the shoot-
ing and was not fired until the state attor-
ney filed charges— something his defense
attorney, Thomas Sclafani, says should
never have happened. “This case should
not have even been prosecuted,” says
Sclafani. “It’s a tragic accident. That’s all
it is.” He has twice filed motions seek-
ing to move Coel’s trial out of the county,
◁
Mary Knowlton
and her husband
Gary in a 2016
family photoJustice is elusive when
policing goes wrong
By Melissa Chan
TheBrief Nation
‘The moment
I’m a happy
person is the
moment I
forget what
happened
to her.’
WILLIAM KNOWLTON,
son of Mary
Knowltonwhich he says was necessary to find jurors
who are not extremely familiar with the
case and one reason it’s moving slowly.
In August, Coel’s trial was rescheduled
for at least the fourth time, to Oct. 22. “I
haven’t given up hope,” Steve Knowlton
says, “but I don’t think we’re going to get
justice.”
History suggests he’s right. Since
Eric Garner died in July 2014 while
being wrestled to the ground by a New
York City police officer, cops rarely
have faced trial in accidental or inten-
tional deaths of civilians. According to
Mapping Police Violence—one of the
few research groups tracking deadly
police encounters in the ab-
sence of a comprehensive
national database—U.S. law-
enforcement officers inten-
tionally or accidentally killed
more than 6,800 civilians
from 2013 to 2018. Other
groups and media outlets
that track data report simi-
lar figures. In 2017 and 2018,
KilledbyPolice.net said po-
lice fatally shot more than
2,300 people nationwide,
and the Washington Post recorded 1,
instances in the same period. An officer
was charged with a crime in 1.7% of the
cases reported by Mapping Police Vio-
lence, says Samuel Sinyangwe, a policy
analyst who co-founded the site, which
compiles data from news stories, police
reports, social media and other sources.