It's been more than five years now since Eric Garner was strangled on the streets of Staten Island. For more than five years America has sat with the indisputable video of NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo putting Garner in a chokehold, as he repeated eleven times 'I can't breathe.' It's been five years, but we are still no closer to justice, in fact we are a lot further away.

Earlier this month, Attorney General William Barr instructed the Justice Department not to bring a civil rights case against NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo, which is just the latest development in this tragic story. However, it is important to recognize how what happened on that hot July day in 2014 has led to a collective trauma shared by people who do not make the headlines.

When Pantaleo and the other NYPD Officers approached Garner, he was with his friend Ramsey Orta. It was Orta who filmed the video of his friend's killing. It is his voice that can be heard saying, "He can't breathe."

While Pantaleo got a raise a few years ago and continues to be employed by the NYPD, Orta is serving time in prison.

Chloe Cooper Jones, a journalist writing for The Verge spent months interviewing and getting to know Orta. Her piece that was published last March, truly works to present his side of the story.

While Orta grew up into a world of poverty, drugs and crime, he thinks it is the video he made to tell the truth about his friend's death that has landed him behind bars.

"Finally, I'm trying to do something good with my life, something good for my community," he told Jones. "And that's when I really get in trouble? "Not the drugs, not the gang stuff, the video?"

Everyone should read Jones' article which details how the police tried to break Orta, even going as far as to tell him to kill himself.

As Jones reported: "Orta says that when he was arrested on the gun charge, the officers told him it would be better to kill himself before they locked him up with their people."

Read the article for yourself to make up your mind, but from where I'm sitting Orta is a political prisoner, guilty only of trying to speak the truth.

The tragedy of what happened to Garner is further compounded by the fate of his daughter Erica.

Erica Garner died of a heart attack in 2017 at the age of 27. She was an activist, who fought to try and build a world where the lives of people like her father would matter to the government. It is not very hard to make a connection between the failure of the government to do anything to help rectify her fathers' murder and her untimely heart attack. There is a limit to how much pain a human heart can endure.

So here we are, five years have gone by and Pantaleo still works for the NYPD. Orta is a political prisoner and Erica Garner is dead. Mayor Bill de Blasio is running for president saying he is motivated in part by his role as a father of a black son. William Barr is the Attorney General and he says that what happened is not a violation of Garner's civil rights. He is also reinstating the death penalty this month.

But perhaps this is not so significant of a change. Maybe it is not so crazy to say that on July 17th, 2014, Eric Garner was given the death penalty by Pantaleo, with the support of every level of the America regime.

In 1983, Bob Dylan wrote a song with lyrics that read:

Now, there's a woman on my block

She just sit there as the night grows still

She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

I think we should all start asking that question.

Who gonna take away his license to kill?

I think Ramsey and Erica deserve an answer to that question.