The last moments of George Floyd’s life were revealed last year by the indelible footage of a policeman kneeling on his neck. But legal experts say the central dispute in the Minneapolis trial of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer accused of murdering Floyd, is likely to boil down to a key question: how exactly did Floyd die?
“If the defense can raise enough doubts about the cause of death,” said David Schultz, visiting professor at the University of Minnesota School of Law, “Derek Chauvin is not to blame.”
Nearly a year after Floyd’s death on May 25, which sparked protests in the United States last summer, Chauvin’s prosecutors and defense will begin arguing on Monday as to whether Chauvin should be held criminally liable.
This will not be an open and closed case, according to legal experts who told Yahoo News about the trial. Schultz, who also teaches at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, estimated that the trial could take at least a month, including one to two weeks for the jury’s deliberations, depending on the number of witnesses, evidence, etc.
And what may seem clear to some people – a policeman appearing to cut off a person’s air supply in his custody – is likely to be questioned by Chauvin’s defense.
Floyd’s death was declared homicide about a week after the incident, according to the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office, which announced on June 1 that Floyd, 46, died of “cardiac arrest complicating subtraction, restraint and compression of the neck” . The report also listed “other significant conditions”, including heart disease, fentanyl poisoning and “recent methamphetamine use”.
Floyd’s family hired two independent examiners to perform a separate autopsy, according to the family’s lawyers. Their findings concluded that Floyd died of asphyxiation under constant pressure. Dr. Michael Baden, one of the independent examiners who also performed an autopsy on Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager who was shot dead by a police officer from Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, said “there is no other health problem that can cause or contribute “to Floyd’s death.
Dmitriy Shakhnevich, a New York lawyer and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Yahoo News that he believes Floyd’s health conditions, according to the county report, will be lifted by Chauvin’s defense. The judge, said Shaknevich – in this case, Judge Peter Cahill of Hennepin County – will be tasked with keeping the subject of Floyd’s health within the scope of the case.
Cahill’s discretion will also apply to Floyd’s arrest in May 2019. He decided last Friday that jurors will be allowed to hear evidence of the incident in which officers took Floyd into custody after finding drugs with him, the report said. USA Today, citing court documents detailing Floyd’s arrest.
“The judge must assess whether the usefulness of this previous arrest is outweighed by the defense’s desire to defame the character of George Floyd,” said Shakhnevich. “There is an understanding that what the defense is trying to do for its client is to make Floyd look bad.”
Chauvin’s defense argued that the arrest, which is captured in images of the camera body, is relevant because new evidence surfaced in December showing that authorities found drugs in a car Floyd was in, the Associated Press reported, and that the incident is similar to the May 2020 arrest.
Mentioning the arrest could, in Schultz’s words, put “the victim on trial”. But it can also show that, in the case of 2019, “the police managed to slow the issue down and it did not result in the death of George Ford,” he said, in contrast to what happened last year.
Leading Chauvin’s defense is Eric Nelson, a founding partner of Halberg Criminal Defense, a Minneapolis-based company that has been practicing law for 20 years and has experience in homicide and drug litigation. Nelson is representing Chauvin through the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, a union of public security workers that covers Chauvin’s defense.
The prosecution is being led by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who was assigned to the case by the governor. Ellison, a former U.S. representative in the state’s Fifth Congressional District and a Democrat, became the first African-American and American Muslim to be elected to a state post when he took up the post of attorney general in 2019.
For Ellison and his team, the challenge will be to overcome the latitude that police officers have historically had in cases of use of force, both by law and by jurors.
According to state law and Supreme Court doctrine, “police officers enjoy a certain qualified immunity to use force at work,” said Schultz. “So what the prosecution is up to is saying that Derek Chauvin’s actions were so irrational that they crossed the line of constitutional and statutory authorized use of force for something that is now criminal.”
The death of Floyd, a black man, under the knee of a white officer also raises the question of how the race will enter the trial.
“The question is, to what extent will the prosecution make race an explicit part of the case,” said Samuel Sommers, a professor of social psychology at Tufts University who studies how race works in the criminal justice system. “I don’t know what they have to do. They can only argue that, believe your eyes, you see someone kneeling on the neck of a helpless civilian for minutes and minutes at a time with that person saying that he cannot breathe. “
Sommers described the jury, a panel of 12 people (plus two alternates and a third person who will be dismissed if the jury is still intact on Monday) made up of white, black and multiracial men and women of various ages, as something surprisingly diverse .
“This is a jury that is more representative of the county from which it was chosen than some people may have predicted would be the result of choosing the jury,” said Sommers. “This [seems] judgments like this tend to be judged on juries that are predominantly or entirely white. “
Sommers added that a diverse jury does not guarantee a certain result. “But having a racially diverse jury at least increases the likelihood of multiple perspectives being considered during the deliberations,” he said.
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