Derek Chauvin trial and verdict: News and updates

On Friday, the Department of Justice released a detailed report on civil rights abuses by the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD).

The report, which was spurred by the 2020 police murder of George Floyd and released just days before Juneteenth, finds that there is “reasonable cause” to believe that the MPD and the City of Minneapolis engaged in a “pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law.” That includes the use of excessive force and discrimination against Black and Native American people.

From 16-year-old Ma’khia Bryant in Columbus to 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago to 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, it is clear that the systemic problems with policing are widespread.

And the problems don’t just include shootings. Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd not with his gun but with his knee — and reportedly had seriously injured one other Black person using similar tactics previously.

Broadly, the reaction to the conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for George Floyd’s murder was one of relief.

“There’s a saying among Black folks,” Veela Ammons, a business consultant and coach based outside Chicago, told me. “It says, ‘It’s not justice, it’s just us.’ And so we thought it was going to be that kind of situation again where even though it was so plain to see, we thought, from anybody’s perspective that this man committed murder, we didn’t think that we would actually get that verdict.”

After a year of protests, anguish, and a weekslong trial, former police officer Derek Chauvin has been found guilty of murdering George Floyd.

The jury found that, by kneeling on Floyd’s neck until Floyd died, the disgraced ex-cop committed second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter — although, for reasons explained below, he’s likely to only face prison time for the first of these three charges.

While Americans waited Tuesday for the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, Fordham Law professor and prominent criminologist John Pfaff tweeted something grim.

He wondered: Would a conviction, “however much justice demands it,” actually be a step forward?

Relief is perhaps the best word to describe what many people felt when they heard Judge Peter Cahill announce the jury’s monumental decision to convict former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin of murder on Tuesday.

Millions of people viewed the cellphone video of Chauvin pinning George Floyd by the neck with his knee last May. Many Americans had previously seen police bludgeon, brutalize, and kill Black people on video (the police assault of Rodney King made its way to TV in 1991), but the murder of Floyd, amid a pandemic that was already ravaging Black communities, became a breaking point in the long history of police claiming the lives of countless Black Americans.

After the conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, President Joe Biden pleaded with the nation — and Congress — not to look away.

“This can be a moment of significant change,” Biden said on Tuesday. “We can’t leave this moment thinking our work is done. We have to look at those 9 minutes and 29 seconds; we have to listen.”

The Derek Chauvin verdict has been nearly a year in the making. Footage of the murder of George Floyd last May has been viewed by millions worldwide, sparking ongoing international protests against police brutality and igniting policy changes to reform and reimagine the role of police. Though the amount of video footage of the killing was unprecedented and the momentum for justice was undeniable, history did not necessarily point to an easy conviction.

The former Minneapolis police officer was found guilty of all three charges — second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. That’s rare in a system where it’s uncommon to prosecute police for killing someone, let alone convict them. For example, only seven police officers have been convicted of murder for police shootings since 2005. The law favors police — giving them latitude to use force — plus, Americans, including jurors, tend to trust police officers.

Closing arguments in Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Floyd wrapped up Monday, and after the jury was excused to begin deliberations, Judge Peter Cahill had some tough words — for Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA).

While attending a protest in Minneapolis on Saturday, the longtime Congress member and chair of the House Committee on Financial Services said she thought Chauvin needed to be convicted of murder and urged protesters to “get more confrontational.”

On Thursday, the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with murdering George Floyd, adjourned for the week. Jurors will hear closing arguments and begin deliberating on Monday.

For more than two weeks, the prosecution, a team of four lawyers, presented 38 witnesses to show that Floyd died as a result of Chauvin’s knee. They put on the stand bystanders who cried recalling the moment they saw Floyd die under Chauvin’s restraint. They brought in 10 local officers, including the Minneapolis police chief, who said the use of force was unreasonable and against protocol. Medical experts testified that a lack of oxygen due to Chauvin’s knee caused Floyd’s heart to stop. In sum, the prosecution brought out witness after witness who supported that Chauvin’s knee was a significant contributing factor in Floyd’s death.

The police killing of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, following a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, came as former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for the killing of George Floyd, roughly 10 miles away.

Wright was shot by 26-year veteran of the Brooklyn Center police force — and former police union president — Kim Potter. Potter, along with the city’s police chief, resigned from the force on Tuesday. And Wednesday, with a state investigation into Wright’s death underway, a county official announced Potter will face second-degree manslaughter charges.

If the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering George Floyd, feels momentous, it’s because it is.

It’s been nearly a year in the making, ushered into being by nearly 365 days of activism and anger, and by the millions who chanted Floyd’s name while vowing to honor his memory.

SNL’s cold open this week featured a fictitious morning news show in Minnesota in which uncomfortable disagreements between anchors highlighted differences in how white and Black Americans perceive the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd, and the state of racial progress.

After an initial series of agreements between the white anchors, played by Kate McKinnon and Alex Moffat, and the Black anchors, played by Ego Nwodim and Kenan Thompson, about how damning the evidence against Chauvin is, they run into trouble.

On May 25, 2020, the world witnessed the final moments leading up to George Floyd’s death: Police officer Derek Chauvin pinned a handcuffed Floyd to the ground with his knee for more than nine minutes until he became unresponsive. The bystander video of the incident, with Floyd muttering his last words, “I can’t breathe,” sparked racial justice protests around the globe. Now, nearly a year later, Chauvin is on trial facing charges of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter.

But despite what people saw, both virtually and in person last May, at the center of the trial is the question: What ultimately killed Floyd? The prosecution has argued that it was Chauvin’s knee, constricting Floyd’s neck and airway, that ultimately led to his death. Meanwhile, the defense has argued that it was Floyd’s history of drug use and underlying conditions that caused his death.

Roughly a year after the start of a national reckoning over police violence and racism toward Black Americans, support for reforms remains strong — as does broad trust in police, according to a new poll from Vox and Data for Progress.

The data comes as the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who has been charged with murder in the death of George Floyd, has prompted renewed discussions about how policing still needs to change.

On Monday, prosecutor Steve Schleicher led a line of questioning that perhaps stands as his team’s strongest case against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin so far — not because the witness’s testimony was especially riveting but because it was coming from Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo.

That the department’s highest-ranking officer was testifying against a team member immediately set the trial apart. In fact, nine other officers from the Minneapolis Police Department have testified against Chauvin in the past week. While Arradondo, the department’s first Black chief, has testified against an officer before (as assistant chief in a highly publicized 2019 case that involved the shooting of an unarmed woman), it’s rare for so many officers to take the stand against a onetime colleague.

My emotions teeter between exasperation and outrage each day I read the trial recap of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is charged with killing George Floyd.

I’m not naïve. I know how these killer cop trials go. The defense drags the deceased victim’s reputation through the mud — “he was a big Black man prone to violence” or “he was under the influence of a drug” — to create a smoke screen, to generate empathy for the cop. From Michael Brown to Philando Castile, too many judges and juries have fallen victim to this tired ploy — the “drug-crazed Negro” script —when a white police officer kills a Black person.

The trial of Derek Chauvin wasn’t going to be broadcast. Minnesota trials never are. It took a pandemic and a decision by Judge Peter Cahill to change that over the objections of the prosecution. Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office argued that televising the hearings live might intimidate the witnesses, making them hesitant to testify. A coalition of news outlets, the defense, and, ultimately, Cahill disagreed.

Members of the public usually have the right to observe courtroom proceedings. It’s typically also safe for a crowd to gather peacefully in a courtroom, or in an overflow room with closed-circuit TVs. But we’re not living in normal times, and this is not a normal trial.

For weeks, the site of the Derek Chauvin trial, where the former police officer faces murder and manslaughter charges for the death of George Floyd, has been fortified.

The Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis is surrounded by concrete barriers, chain-link fencing, and barbed wire. Nearby buildings have boarded up their storefront windows. Members of the National Guard have been patrolling the area, and Minneapolis’s mayor and police chief said the law enforcement presence at the site of Floyd’s death — as well as throughout the city — will only increase as the trial continues.

It’s been more than 300 days since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned down George Floyd’s neck — but time hasn’t dampened the mental anguish of seeing a Black man die under the weight of a white man sworn to protect the public.

Instead, Chauvin’s criminal trial, which began on March 29 and is expected to continue for weeks, has only heightened the emotional toll of the disturbing event.

Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer accused of killing George Floyd, is on trial right now. But Chauvin is a major outlier in a system that very rarely imposes serious criminal charges against cops for an on-duty shooting or killing.

Take shootings, for which Chauvin is not accused of, but for which we have the best data: Since 2005, 139 police officers have been arrested for murder or manslaughter due to an on-duty shooting, according to data from Philip Matthew Stinson, a criminal justice expert at Bowling Green State University who has been tracking the data for years. That amounts to fewer than nine prosecutions a year.

The first week of the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd, has been an emotional one. Witnesses who watched Chauvin pin the 46-year-old Black man by the neck with his knee described the trauma they had to live with afterward. They said they were upset and desperate to save Floyd’s life; several testified to calling the police on the police. Four of the witnesses on Tuesday were under 18 at the time of Floyd’s death — the youngest is now 9 — and testified with the cameras off, their voices wavering and sobbing as they narrated the nine minutes and 29 seconds they saw Floyd “fighting to breathe.”

Some of the most affecting testimonies came from 61-year-old bystander Charles McMillian, who broke down in tears after watching a replay of the body camera video of Floyd calling for his mom during the arrest, and Darnella Frazier, who recorded Floyd’s fatal arrest in a video that sparked a rallying cry on the streets.

The quest to seat the jury in the high-profile murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has reached its end.

In the last two weeks of the televised jury selection process, viewers got a sense of how the judge, defense attorney, prosecutors, and jury would perform when the trial starts Monday.

The trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who is charged with the murder of George Floyd, has been delayed for at least a day. The district court judge is awaiting an appeals decision about adding a third-degree murder charge, on top of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges. Chauvin was caught on video last May kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes in Minneapolis, sparking worldwide protests against police violence.

The third-degree murder charge, under Minnesota law, means the perpetrator acted in a way that was reckless at the risk of causing death and carries a sentence of no more than 25 years. Prosecutors are arguing for the charge because it is easier to prove than second-degree unintentional felony murder. The pending charge would also provide options for jurors about how to convict, since police killings have historically gone unpunished. Police kill about 1,000 people in the line of duty every year. But according to a multiyear study on police crime using Google News, only a total of 80 American cops were charged with murder or manslaughter between 2005 and April 2017, and only 28 of those were convicted.

The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Bill of 2021 — legislation that Democratic lawmakers believe will reduce police violence against people of color, particularly Black Americans, while also improving policing for everyone.

“At some point, we have to ask ourselves, how many more people have to die? How many more people have to be brutalized on videotape?” Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), who led the bill, said ahead of its passage. “We must act now to transform policing in the United States.”