Columbia Law School Postpones Final Exams as Students Deal With Eric Garner, Michael Brown Shootings: Harvard, Georgetown Students Request Leniency

Columbia Law School has allowed its students to delay final exams due to the "trauma" following two racially charged cases in which grand juries chose not to indict white police officers involved in the deaths of unarmed black men.

The two cases involved 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was fatally shot in August by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer, and Eric Garner from Staten Island, New York, who died after an NYPD officer put him in a chokehold.

Now, other students at Harvard and Georgetown are following suit, asking for leniency in the wake of these decisions in New York and Missouri, Fox News reports.

"For some law students, particularly, though not only, students of color, this chain of events is all the more profound as it threatens to undermine a sense that the law is a fundamental pillar of society to protect fairness, due process and equality," Robert E. Scott, Columbia's interim dean, said to the school in an email sent Saturday.

The school email was sent after a group of minority students called for the exams to be postponed, especially as the same legal principles they were studying were being used, as they put it, to "deny justice to so many black and brown bodies."

This group, the Columbia Law School Coalition of Concerned Students of Color, wrote to administrators with their concerns and posted the letter online.

"We have struggled to compartmentalize our trauma as we sit and make fruitless attempts to focus on exam preparations," they said. "In being asked to prepare for and take our exams in this moment, we are being asked to perform incredible acts of disassociation that have led us to question our place in this school community and the legal community at large."

The group said the grand jury decisions were "legal violence" and that members cannot sleep at night, the effects of which "will be present on exam day."

"We sit to study with the knowledge that our brothers and sisters are regularly killed with impunity on borders and streets," the group added. "We sit to study with the understanding that our brothers and sisters are marching to have our humanity recognized and valued by a system that has continually failed us."