Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz suggested in “Angle of Ingraham” on Friday that Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer accused of George Floyd’s death, could not get a fair trial in the city after the Judge of the case rejected the defense’s requests for a change of location.
DERSHOWITZ: It is a serious constitutional error. The judge is focusing on the wrong question: the issue of prejudice. What he should focus on is that jurors will be afraid that if they absolve or fail to convict for murder, there may be violence. Your own homes, your own stores, your own family can be affected.
Not only is the thumb on the scale, but the elbow is on the scale. No juror should be concerned that if they acquit themselves, there will be consequences outside the court. That is why this trial must be carried out in a rural area, far from where there may be violence.
It should take several months, and everything the defendant may know about the victim must be known to the jury. You have to see this case through the prism – through the defendant’s eyes. If the defendant knew that he [Floyd] it was violent, if he knew he used drugs, then it’s permissible. If he didn’t know, then it was a different theory.
My defense would be this: number one, knee in the neck – although now we know it was wrong – I was [police] politics in Minneapolis. In addition, it has been used dozens of times and no one has died. Why did that person die? The defense would be, not because of the knee in the neck, but because of his pre-existing illnesses, his high blood pressure, his medications in the body. This was the immediate cause and the best proof of this is that the knee in the neck had been used in the past without any deaths.
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