One of the most closely-watched and important trials in a very long time began on Monday in Minneapolis, in the Hennepin County District Court, as the murder trial for former police officer Derek Chauvin, who is being charged with murder in the death of George Floyd last summer, started. The death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, resulted in nationwide protests against police brutality and calls for equal treatment of Black people, igniting the Black Lives Matter protest movement.
The trial opened on Monday in a televised court hearing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a first in any Minnesota court. Fourteen jurors (two of which are alternates) were selected to hear the case. The selection of jurors, which started last December, faced significant roadblocks and issues, over concerns of representation and bias. Of the 12 jurors who will hear the case, six are white and six are people of color. One major issue in jury selection was when the city of Minneapolis paid $27 million in settlement claims to Floyd’s family, which many worried would result in the jury not being able to conduct an impartial examination of the evidence and give an unbiased opinion.
For almost a year, much of our understanding of how Floyd died came from a video shot by a bystander, with many concluding that Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds, a time which has now become synonymous with the killing and a symbol of police brutality. However, Jerry Blackwell, a lawyer working for the prosecuting Hennepin County District Attorney, said, in opening statements, that Chauvin had actually knelt on Floyd for 9 minutes 29 seconds, a 43-second increase from the previous time.
The prosecution mainly relied on playing several damning videos depicting the events that went down on the day Floyd was killed to help build their argument, a tactic that has been used previously in a number of high-profile police killings. Defense attorneys for Chauvin said that the jurors needed to consider the circumstances surrounding the case, because the use of force, though “not attractive,” “is a necessary component of policing” and that Chauvin simply “did exactly what he had been trained to do over the course of his 19-year career.”
The prosecution said they would produce heaps of evidence Chauvin violated policy and accepted practice, while Chauvin’s lawyers said there were over 50,000 items in evidence to consider, outside of the video.
Although the video of the killing will likely be one of the most important pieces of evidence in the trial, Floyd’s exact cause of death will likely play a big part in determining the outcome of this trial. An autopsy report conducted on Floyd classified Floyd’s death as a homicide and found that the cause was “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression,” which meant that Floyd had died due to a deprivation of oxygen because of restricted blood flow. Prosecutors said they would bring in seven medical experts as well as the medical examiner who performed the autopsy to show that the cause of death was asphyxia.
If Floyd had died of asphyxia, it would be easier to put the blame squarely on Chauvin, while death due to cardiopulmonary arrest could be argued to be caused by other factors. The defense argued that Floyd had died of drug ingestion, heart disease, and “adrenaline flowing through his body.” The autopsy did find fentanyl and methamphetamine in Floyd’s body.
Blackwell argued that a person suffering from drug overdose, such as from opiods, would not behave in the way Floyd did in the video. A person suffering from an overdose would fall unconscious, but Floyd continually shouted that he was unable to breathe and called for the officer to stop, while also asking for his mother.
The prosecutors also called in three witnesses on Monday, which included Jena Lee Scurry, a 911 dispatcher who observed Floyd’s arrest on a surveillance video, Alisha Oyler, a cashier from a store just outside where Floyd was arrested, and Donald Williams, a martial artist who had witnessed the arrest live. Scurry had alerted a supervising sergeant about what was happening after she felt something wrong with the arrest, while Williams, a bystander, had tried to stop Chauvin from continuing to kneel on Floyd’s neck.
The proceeding generated substantial public interest. A few hundred protesters gathered outside the courthouse where the trial took place, overlooked by members of the National Guard and police officers and a helicopter that flew overhead all day. Before the trial, Floyd’s family and lawyers had conducted a moment of silence in memorial of Floyd.
This trial is especially important for many reasons. One of Floyd’s brothers said that this trial would be the opportunity to show that people could trust the American criminal justice system. A lawyer working for the Floyd family said that besides Chauvin, America’s ability to deal with police accountability is also on trial. Another lawyer, Ben Crump, said that “the whole world is watching” at how this trial would go.
In recent years, members of law enforcement have killed approximately 1,000 people are year, but fewer than 200 officers had been charged in the past 15 years and of those, only 15 have been convicted.
If the jury ultimately acquits Chauvin, we could be looking at nationwide riots not too dissimilar to the riots which occurred after the officers who allegedly killed Rodney King, a Black man living in Los Angeles, back in 1991 were acquitted. The riots, which took place after the officers were acquitted by a jury in 1992, saw 63 people killed, well over 2,000 injuries, 12,000 arrests, and at least $1 billion in property damage and looting.
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