13-04-21, 13:49
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Re: George Floyd Trial Chauvins’ Defence Faces Uphill Battle
Chauvins’ Defence Faces Uphill Battle After Prosecution Undercuts Case
Police and medical experts have eroded key defence arguments over George Floyds’ death
The Guardian UK, 13 APR 2021.
Derek Chauvin’s trial opened last month with his lawyer telling the jury there was much more to George Floyd’s death than the now notorious video that prompted global protests for racial justice and landed the former police officer with a murder charge.
Eric Nelson laid out the pillars of his defence of Chauvin, the former Minneapolis officer filmed kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, in his opening statement. He said there was an untold story of drug intoxication, a failing heart, a hostile mob, and a police officer doing the best he was trained to do.
Nelson also had a card up his sleeve: an official autopsy that made no mention of Floyd having the breath squeezed out of him, as the prosecution claimed, but which did talk about a heart condition and illegal drug use.
The defence lawyer promised the jurors that by the time they heard all the evidence, “common sense” would require them to acquit the former policeman who has denied charges of second- and third-degree murder, and manslaughter, over Floyd’s death last May.
But as Nelson begins to present his case on Tuesday, he will be confronted with persuading a jury that has listened to a parade of prosecution witnesses who already appear to have done considerable damage to his case.
Nelson is presenting two key arguments. He says that whatever actions Chauvin took were reasonable and followed his training as a police officer, and that in any case those actions are not what killed Floyd.
“You will learn that Derek Chauvin did exactly what he had been trained to do over the course of his 19-year career. The use of force is not attractive, but it is a necessary component of policing,” he told the jury.
But that will be a harder line for Nelson to push after no less than eight of Chauvin’s former colleagues in the Minneapolis police department, including the head of the murder squad, told the jury that digging a knee into a suspect’s neck as a means of detaining them was never authorised. Remarkably, those testifying against Chauvin also included the city’s police chief, Medaria Arradondo, who fired him the day after Floyd’s death and called it “murder”.
“It’s not part of our training, and it is certainly not part of our ethics and our values,” he said of Chauvin’s conduct.
Defence lawyers frequently tell juries trying police officers not to second-guess those who have to make split-second life-and-death decisions. But that is going to be a difficult argument to present in the face of video that shows Chauvin pressing his knee down on a passive Floyd with plenty of time to decide on his actions.
Likewise, a jury might decide that Nelson’s claim that Chauvin and the three officers with him faced a hostile mob, which distracted them from focussing on Floyd’s growing struggle for life, is not what they see on a video showing bystanders mostly pleading with Chauvin to lift his knee.
But perhaps the biggest obstacle the defence now faces is the wealth of testimony from medical experts about how Floyd died.
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