I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street - Matt Taibbi

Category: Misc. Non-fiction, Political
Language: English
Keywords: american Politics Court Court System Incarceration Investigative Reporting Judicial System Mass Incarceration Politics Poverty Reaganism supreme court

Written by Matt Taibbi
Read by Dominic Hoffman
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

I Can’t Breathe is a book by best selling author Matt Taibbi that examines what life is like on the streets, and our Kafkaesque court system. He informs us on the issues around policing, mass incarceration, the underground economy, and racial disparity in law enforcement. It focuses on a particular case of a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner who was arrested for selling bootleg cigarettes, put in an illegal chokehold, and strangled to death by a police officer. Garner’s final agonizing moments were a plead for respite, “I can’t breathe”, which were ignored by the arresting officers.

Matt Taibbi’s deeply reported retelling of these events liberates Eric Garner from the abstractions of newspaper accounts and lets us see the man in full—with all his flaws and contradictions intact. A husband and father with a complicated personal history, Garner was neither villain nor victim, but a fiercely proud individual determined to do the best that he could for his family, bedeviled by bad luck, and ultimately subdued by forces beyond his control. No one emerges unsullied, from the conservative district attorney who half-heartedly prosecutes the case, to the progressive mayor caught between the demands of outraged activists and the foot-dragging of uncooperative police officials.

It is a masterly narrative of urban America and a scathing indictment of the perverse incentives built into our penal system, I Can’t Breathe drills down into the particulars of one case to confront us with the human cost of our broken approach to dispensing criminal justice.