The city of Minneapolis agreed to pay $ 27 million to George Floyd’s family to settle a wrongful death lawsuit filed last July.
The Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously to approve the deal during a meeting on Friday amid the first week of jury selection at the ongoing criminal trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer accused of killing Floyd last May. .
As part of the deal, $ 500,000 will be used “for the benefit of the community” around 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, the site of Floyd’s death that has now become widely known as George Floyd Square.
“No amount of money can ever deal with the intense pain or trauma caused by his death to the family of George Floyd or the people of our city,” said city council president Lisa Bender after the vote. “Minneapolis has fundamentally changed in this age of racial evaluation.”
Lawyers for the Floyd family said on Friday that this was “the largest pre-trial settlement in a civil rights wrongful death case in the history of the United States.”
“That the biggest pre-trial settlement in a negligent death case would never be for the life of a black man sends a powerful message that black lives are important and police brutality against people of color must end,” Benjamin Crump , one of the lawyers, said in a statement.
Floyd’s brother Rodney Floyd said the deal was a “necessary step” for the family to achieve some closure.
“George’s legacy to those who loved him will always be his spirit of optimism that things can get better, and we hope that this deal does just that – that it makes things a little better in Minneapolis and enlightens communities across the country, ”Rodney Floyd said in a statement.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said the deal with the Floyd family “reflects a shared commitment to advancing racial justice”.
On Friday afternoon, six jurors were selected. Chauvin’s criminal trial began on Monday amid increased security in the city. He was charged with second-degree murder, second-degree murder and third-degree murder.
Lawyers for the Floyd family said they were also waiting “for justice in the criminal courts”.
Last July, Floyd’s family filed a civil lawsuit alleging that Chauvin and the three other officers involved in Floyd’s death violated his constitutional rights by using “the unjustified, excessive, illegal and deadly use of force”.
The lawsuit also accused the Minneapolis Police Department and the city of acting with “deliberate indifference” in tolerating unconstitutional police practices, which were the “driving force behind George’s death”.
Any public information about the case, including the deal, could be detrimental to the defense, Ted Sampsell-Jones, a professor at Mitchell Hamline Law School, told BuzzFeed News ahead of Friday’s announcement.
However, he believed that the civil settlement would have no impact on the criminal trial. It would not be admissible evidence, so the jury would not hear about everything, said Sampsell-Jones.
“Of course, with this trial, there is a ton of unacceptable evidence that has been published in the media,” he said. “We just have to wait for the jury to follow the law, ignore what it reads in the press and decide the case based on the evidence presented at the trial.”
In 2019, Minneapolis agreed to a $ 20 million deal with the family of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, who was fatally shot by former Minneapolis officer Mohamed Noor, a Somali American convicted of third-degree murder and second-degree murder.
Floyd’s civil lawsuit said that while the city’s settlement with Damond’s family was “classified as a transformative one, it had no significant impact on how the MPD conducts its business”.