19 April 2021
Derek Chauvin is getting a fair trial —
will the community accept the verdict?
Closing arguments in the case of lawman Derek Chauvin, accused of murdering George Floyd by kneeling on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes, start this morning. The mixed race jury, which will be “sequestered” (more on that below), is expected to begin deliberations this afternoon.
One reason I’m following Chauvin’s trial: The issue — whether police officers will be held accountable for lethal force of dubious justification — is of national importance. The other: I grew up in northern Minnesota but lived in Minneapolis when law-n-order Charlie Stenvig was mayor. Minnesota Nice never has applied to Minneapolis’ police force.
Chauvin, 5-9 and 140 lbs, arrested Floyd, 6-3 and 230 lbs, following a store’s accusation that Floyd tried to pass a counterfeit $20 federal reserve note. I’ve been unable to learn whether the bill was counterfeit. If it was, we’ll never know for sure whether Floyd knew it was. But I think most decent people agree that trying to pass a bogus twenty is neither a violent act nor an act justifying lethal force.
The prosecution presented a lot of evidence that Floyd died because Chauvin kneeled on his neck for over nine minutes, choking him. Floyd had Fentynal and methamphetime in his blood, but the prosecution’s expert witnesses said he died because with Chauvin’s knee on his neck he could not inhale enough oxygen to live, not because he was on drugs or had heart disease.
Chauvin, as is his right, did not testify. His attorneys presented a handful of expert witnesses, one living in Montana, to contradict the prosecution’s experts in an effort to plant a seed of doubt in the minds of the jurors. I think that in its closing argument, Chauvin’s lawyers will argue that the prosecution did not prove its case because there is reasonable doubt that the lawman’s knee on Floyd’s neck is what killed him.
Friday, unexpectedly, the defense presented testimony that Floyd died not from asphyxiation but from carbon monoxide in the fumes he inhaled from the police crusier’s exhaust pipe next to his nose. If true, that would challenge the prosecution’s theory of how the knee on the neck killed Floyd, but not the argument that Floyd died because he had a knee on his neck for more than nine minutes. I would be surpised were the jury to accord that defense argument much weight.
Jurors are notoriously pro-police. I suspect the prosecution would be happy with a guilty verdict on the least serious charge against Chauvin. In fact, I think that charging Chauvin with several crimes of differing seriousness was designed to present the jury with a smorgasboard of acceptable verdicts, thereby giving the jurors a way to convict while telling themselves they rejected charges they considered prosecutorial overreaching.
An acquittal would delight Chauvin’s attorneys, but I doubt they expect one. They probably are hoping for a hung jury; if not that, a conviction on the least serious charge; and for reversable error they can take to an appellate court.
Most of the public, I think, and certainly most communities of color, consider Chauvin guilty as hell. If he’s acquitted, or if his jury hangs, all hell may break loose in Minneapolis and across the nation, with huge but peaceful assemblies of protesters undercut by criminals who break windows, burn building, loot, and injure police officers. Americans have great tolerance for peaceful protest followed by constructive political action, but no tolerance for vandalism, arson, stealing, and assault.
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Sequestration. In plain language, as a reward for doing their duty, jurors, during their deliberations, will be locked up and denied access to news, friends, and family, until they reach a verdict. The court assumes that jurors, untrained in the law, are impressionable simpletons who will be "tainted" by a glance at a newspaper. I would be so angry at such an insult to my intelligence that I would be suspicious that information favorable to the defendant was being suppressed. In that situation, the only moral choice is trying to hang the jury to give justice another chance to prevail.
The judge told the jurors to bring a bag with clothing and toiletries for several days, which suggests to me he expects deliberations to last several days. It also makes me suspect he’s prepared to issue a dynamite charge to try to blast a verdict out of a hung jury. Although a dynamite charge is technically simply an exhortation to re-examine the evidence and to redouble efforts to reach unanimity, in reality it’s a way of telling the jury’s majority to browbeat the holdouts until they weary of the abuse and cave-in just to get home. Dynamite charges end trials, but only by accident do they deliver justice.
Counterfeit twenties. Back in the greenback days, these bills used to be produced by gangsters or rogue government with access to specialized printing presses and unstarched, nonfluorescing paper that looked like the paper used for federal reserve notes. Today, bogus twenties of varying quality are produced with inexpensive inkjet printers. If the counterfeit bill contains starch, an iodine pen will leave a brown mark on the bill. That’s not dispositive, however, because the iodine also will leave a mark (a false positive) on a genuine bill that has been starched (the magician and hoax exposer James Randi was fond of pointing this out), and not leave a mark (a false negative) on a counterfeit bill printed on unstarched paper.
With so much commerce committed by making payments electronically, inkjet twenties are a moral outrage, but not a threat to the economy. Trying to pass one is either an act of desperation or an act of staggering stupidity. Thanks to Derek Chauvin, we’ll never know whether Floyd knew he was passing a bogus bill (if the bill he was trying to pass was indeed bogus), and if he did, whether he was desperate or just stupid.