For the umpteenth time, his fate was not a punishment or sentence that is supposed to be directly proportionate to his crime. His death was a strictly a result of his encounter with the officers, and would not have been any more or less justified had be been innocent of any crime, or guilty of mass murder. The inability of people like you or moondog to grasp this notion undermines your credibility in legitimate discussions of police authority.
Illegal means against the law, not "in opposition to guidelines for carrying out duties".

It is not at all obvious that he has clearly surrendered, rather he is batting away the hands of the officer attempting to cuff him, and holding his hands up out of the reach of the much smaller cop.

Garner was not cooperating with attempts to put handcuffs on him, which is why he was grabbed, pulled to the ground, and then rolled over face down. Your description implies a completely different sequence, omitting that the officer who was charged actually lay down beneath Garner to cushion his fall.

And even the article YOU linked gives a different description of the event:
"Garner put his hands up in the air, as the crook of Pantaleo's elbow tightened around his throat." (though that bit appears to have been cut from the video, as we see him holding his hands away from the cop in front, before the cop behind grabs him and pulls him to the ground then cut to him on his face, complaining that he can't breathe, even though there is no one touching his neck.

Note the phrasing. He died AFTER being put in a choke-hold, not AS A RESULT OF being put in a choke-hold. His obesity is a far more likely cause of a heart attack than a choke-hold. Even sympathetic accounts describe him as talking after being "choked" which makes the claim that he was in a choke-hold itself highly suspect. A more reasonable account is that he was grabbed around the neck, because that was the only part of his upper body the cops could actually get an arm around. He was not choked into submission, he was pulled down and rolled onto his face.

In any event, the alternative prescribed by NYC police rules to that "choke-hold" would be to hit him with a metal pipe (which is all a baton actually is) until he was on the ground, and no longer trying to rise, or else with a taser or pepper spray. Given the complete historical lack of deaths from a properly applied police choke-hold, before departments started prohibiting them for PR reasons in the 1980s & 90s, it is far more likely that his death was an unfortunate consequence of his own health. As per the article:

"But the medical examiner also listed acute and chronic bronchial asthma, obesity and hypertensive cardiovascular disease as contributing factors in Garner's death."

And they were given the full evidence available, rather than an edited and highlighted video that CNN posted on their website. It's not as if the media does not have a history of altering this sort of thing to redound to the discredit of the alleged assailants. They edited the video of Rodney King's arrest, while the jury saw the whole thing that never aired on TV. The media edited George Zimmerman's 911 call to make it appear he called to report a black man, when in fact, he only brought up race when specifically asked by the dispatcher, whose question was elided from the recording played on TV.
Which is still illegal, and he was still liable for arrest. I don't agree with the law, but it's also not a profound moral right such as to justify civil disobedience.
Yes, and you make serious people who try to bring up this point look bad, because people who make the same statement on serious grounds, get lumped in with the rest of you ignoramuses, who nitpick over stuff like this.

In any event, the real issues with a police state are not the tactics they use to protect themselves and the general public, and their employment of armed force, but the conditions over when and how they are deployed, and the policies and procedures they are permitted. At most, this is the story of a cop who broke his own department's rules. It is hardly a symptom of excessive or intrusive utilization of law enforcement. How are to address such an issue? Double-forbid the choke-hold? Subject officers to additional lectures on acceptable techniques, which they are just going to ignore anyway, when an enormous suspect starts slapping away a fellow cop's hands and escalating his belligerence in a minor confrontation? Bear in mind, every refresher course, or updated training on subduing suspects, is something you have to pay each officer to take, courtesy of those sacrosanct public employee unions leftwingers are all so fond of defending.

And on a related note, regarding their handling of this and other such encounters, backing down is simply not an option for the police, or else it just encourages everyone else to escalate a confrontation in order to drive away the cops, and get away with serious crimes. That's why they throw out evidence obtained through illegal searches - because there is no practicable way to allow suspects to stop the police from taking such evidence. No law or ruling will ever encourage or permit physical resistance to the cops, rather they will throw out convictions or indictments following improper arrests, or at least award damages to the improperly arrested party. If the cops are wrong to arrest you, the lawful time and place to fight that is afterwards, not by fleeing or fighting. Resisting arrest & eluding are crimes that have nothing to do with whether or not you are guilty of any other crime.

In my own encounters with cops, I have noticed an almost pathological inability to accept a defeat gracefully. They seem all but incapable of losing an argument or conceding a point in public. Even if you are absolutely on solid ground, and incontrovertibly right, they have to fire back with some other issue, in order to have the last word, and maintain the illusion of their authority, even when not strictly relevant. It's sort of like military discipline, where soldiers have to obey all orders, no matter what, to ensure that they maintain the habit of obedience when it is a matter of life and death. A cop cannot allow anyone to "win" a fight or argument on duty, because then everyone will start fighting back, even when the suspects are in the wrong and everyone knows it. I once pointed out to a cop something he was doing wrong, and made my case politely and respectfully, and he conceded the point, and then accused me of not completely following through on my own compliance with a completely unrelated action. It was not being done at the time, nor did it have any bearing on the issue I brought up with the cop. It was just a case of "You're right about X, but in the past, I've noticed you doing Y." No reason, other than to seize an imaginary moral high ground, lest I somehow come away from that conversation thinking I can tell off a cop.

But with that kind of "no retreat mentality," where did Garner think the confrontation was going to go, once he started slapping away the cuffs? Did he think the cops were going to say "Oh, my mistake. You don't want to wear these? That's okay then,"? But when he started batting away the officer's hands, and raising his voice, Pantaleo jumps on him to prevent any further escalation of the situation. Although in this case, there is a unique death, most of the time, that action would have prevented things from moving further along until guns were drawn or other weapons used, when Garner had crossed a line that required such tactics.

This sort of mentality is the kind of thing that we might need to examine closely, but the opposite side of the issue, is what happens then, if the police have no power to arrest or compel cooperation? What happens to the law, if you can just slap away a cop who tries to cuff you, and they have to back off meekly and let you walk away?

With issues like this in mind, the only answer I can see is to be more stringent in the sort of things toward which police are permitted to bring their power to bear. Maybe we have to rethink whether or not police should be allowed to break up fights on a public street, or enforce commercial regulations and ordinances. It's another aspect of the problem of governing and using law at all. Since any law you pass could, at its most fundamental execution, rely on a potential confrontation to enforce it as in the case where Eric Garner died, maybe you have to ask yourself, "Is the good I am trying to achieve with this law, this executive order, this city ordinance, worth the price of dissenter being killed by the police?" If something as trivial as selling untaxed cigarettes can result in the death of a perpetrator when the law is brought to bear on violators, it can happen for anything. Maybe government should just back the hell off, unless it is worth dead bodies.

Why are cigarettes taxed anyway? Mostly, these days, to prevent people from using them, because of the health risks to such users. So either the law intended to prevent deaths from smoking (i.e. respiratory issues) had an epic fail, as it caused Garner to die of respiratory issues, or just maybe, Garner got poetic justice, because he might have been evading law designed to protect people from the effects of the product he was suspected of selling.