The trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer accused of the death of George Floyd, is expected to turn on Monday for his police training. The first week was dominated by testimony from prosecution witnesses, including paramedics and police officers who treated Floyd, as well as passersby outside the store where Floyd was placed under arrest.
Chauvin, 45, is charged with manslaughter and manslaughter in the death of Floyd on May 25, 2020. Prosecutors argue that Chauvin, who is white, killed Floyd by kneeling on the neck of the 46-year-old black man for 9 minutes and 29 seconds while he was lying face down in handcuffs outside a corner market.
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The defense argues that Chauvin did what he was trained to do and that Floyd’s drug use during his imprisonment, as well as the underlying health and adrenaline conditions, caused his death. An autopsy conducted by the Hennepin County medical examiner found fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system.
Minneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo is due to testify during the second week of the trial, perhaps as early as Monday. Arradondo, the city’s first black police chief, fired Chauvin and three other policemen the day after Floyd’s death, and in June called it “murder”.
“Mr. George Floyd’s tragic death was not due to a lack of training – the training was there,” said Arradondo at the time, according to the Associated Press. “Chauvin knew what he was doing.”
The city changed shortly after Floyd’s death to ban police strangulations and neck restraints. Arradondo and Mayor Jacob Frey also made several policy changes, including expanding the requirements for reporting incidents of use of force and documenting their attempts to mitigate situations, even when force is not used.
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On Friday, when prosecutors called the head of the Minneapolis Police Department’s homicide division on the stand on the fifth day of the trial, Lieutenant Richard Zimmerman testified that he had never been trained to kneel on the neck of someone handcuffed in the back. , which he said was classified as “first-rate deadly force”.
“Totally unnecessary,” testified Zimmerman, the senior police officer on Friday. He said that, since Floyd was handcuffed, he saw “no reason for the officers to think they were in danger, if that’s what they felt, and that’s what they would have to feel to be able to use that kind of force.”
In this screenshot of the video, defense attorney Eric Nelson, left, Minneapolis defendant and former police officer Derek Chauvin, right, and Nelson’s assistant Amy Voss, back, introduce themselves to the jurors while the judge from Hennepin County, Peter Cahill, presides over the jury selection at the Chauvin trial Wednesday, March 17, 2021. (Court TV, via AP, Pool)
Zimmerman, who joined the department in 1985, said he was never trained to kneel on someone’s neck if his hands are handcuffed behind his back and they are lying down. He said police officers should get a person out of position as soon as possible because it restricts their breathing.
During the interrogation, Chauvin’s defense lawyer, Eric Nelson, questioned Zimmerman about his experiences with using force and handcuffs to physically fight individuals.
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Zimmerman agreed with Nelson’s statement that it had been “a few years” since he was “in a physical fight with a person”. Nelson also asked questions about the threat that a handcuffed suspect could still pose, as well as whether the handcuffs could fail, and also suggested that passersby shouting at the police may have led them astray from Floyd and made them feel threatened.
Fox News’ Stephanie Pagones and The Associated Press contributed to this report.