Garner testimony will stay sealed

Request for documents from grand jury denied

NEW YORK — A judge on Thursday refused to release testimony heard by a grand jury that declined to indict a police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, finding he hadn’t heard a valid reason to make the secret information public.

The New York Civil Liberties Union and others had asked the court to order Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan to release the grand jury transcript, including the testimony of the officer involved, Daniel Pantaleo, and dozens of witnesses, detailed descriptions of evidence and other documentation. A similar step was voluntarily taken by the prosecutor in Ferguson, Missouri, when a grand jury there refused to indict an officer in the fatal police shooting of 18-yearold Michael Brown.

Both Garner and Brown were black; the officers involved are white. The deaths sparked nationwide protests about the treatment of communities of color by law enforcement and a debate about the role of race in policing.

The effort to make the Garner grand jury record public had been considered a longshot given that New York laws explicitly bar disclosure absent a court order. But the decision also comes amid a debate over whether the laws should be revised to provide more transparency in the process, particularly when it involves police shootings.

Civil liberties lawyers had argued that the public needs to reconcile the widely watched video of Garner’s July 17 death with the decision not to indict the officer involved.

But State Supreme Court Justice William Garnett wrote that the law required the NYCLU and the other parties who brought the lawsuit to establish a “compelling and particularized need” to release the grand jury minutes.