The family of Eric Garner has continued to fight for his justice with a screening of the documentary/drama American Trial: The Eric Garner Story. The film features a fictionalized jury trial to represent what may have happened had a grand jury decided to indict the officers connected to Garner's death.

Garner was killed by NYPD officers after being placed into an illegal chokehold for selling loose cigarettes. Though former officer Daniel Pantaleo was deemed responsible for Garner's death, he was never charged.

The film utilized real lawyers and witnesses, who provided testimony, to show what might have happened if the case was actually allowed to go to trial.

“Every trial is partially scripted. No attorney asks a question that they don’t know the answer to. So in that respect, given that they worked on it as they would a real case, you can say the attorneys wrote this film even though there was no actual screenplay,” director Roee Messinger said during a post-screening discussion of the film at New York Film Festival, according to The Root. “Even the testimony of Anthony Altieri as Officer Pantaleo was not scripted. What we did is we made a list of facts that were disputed. We asked the actor about those facts and his performance was completely improvised.”

Both members of the family and the director confirmed that they were contacted by the Justice Department in order to stop production on the film, but nevertheless, they continued. Esaw Snipes-Garner even shared a story about one of the meetings that highlighted the activist spirit of their late daughter, Erica Garner. The heroism she showed following the death of her father made her an iconic figure to many.

“When we had the first meeting with the Department of Justice, they said we couldn’t record anything. Lo and behold, my warrior daughter Erica, rest in peace, recorded the whole thing," Snipes-Garner said to the Film Festival crowd, according to The Root. "It was [on Twitter] before we even got out of the meeting. They were talking about arresting her and taking her to jail and all of that. She said ‘Ma, I don’t care. They’re not going to do anything about daddy’s case.’”

American Trial: The Eric Garner Story is currently seeking distribution.

Daniel-Pantaelo

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