Chauvin defense spotlights Floyd’s ’19 arrest
Prosecution contends information irrelevant
MINNEAPOLIS — A lawyer for the former Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee against George Floyd’s neck wants to bring up Floyd’s history of drug use and a previous arrest to suggest to jurors that Floyd was partly to blame for his own death.
A prosecutor contends that it’s irrelevant and that Derek Chauvin’s lawyer is trying to smear Floyd to excuse his client’s actions. Chauvin is charged with murder and manslaughter.
Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill must decide the question of how much the trial will revolve around Floyd’s own actions on May 25, when the Black man died after Chauvin, who is white, pressed his knee against his neck for about nine minutes. Floyd’s death, captured on a bystander video, set off weeks of sometimes-violent protests across the country.
The judge previously rejected Chauvin’s attempt to tell the jury about Floyd’s May 2019 arrest — a year before his fatal encounter with Chauvin — but heard fresh arguments Tuesday from both sides. He said he would rule on the request Wednesday at the earliest.
Defense attorney Eric Nelson argued that new evidence makes the earlier arrest admissible: Drugs were found last December during a second search of the car Floyd was in and were found in a January search of the squad car into which the four officers attempted to put Floyd.
He also argued the similarities in both encounters are relevant: Both times, as officers drew their guns and struggled to get Floyd out of the car, he called out for his mother, said he had been shot before and cried, and put what appeared to be pills in his mouth. Both searches turned up drugs in the cars.
In the first arrest, several opioid pills were found, with cocaine. An autopsy showed Floyd had fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system when he died.
“The similarities are incredible. The exact same behavior in two incidents, almost one year apart,” Nelson said.
Paramedics who examined Floyd in 2019 warned him that his blood pressure was dangerously high, putting him at risk for a heart attack or stroke, and took him to a hospital for examination. Nelson argued that showed Floyd knew that swallowing drugs might result in going to the hospital rather than jail.
But prosecutor Matthew Frank argued that evidence from the 2019 arrest was prejudicial. He said the defense wants it as a backdoor way of depicting Floyd as a bad person. He called it “the desperation of the defense to smear Mr. Floyd’s character, to show that what he struggled with an opiate addiction like so many Americans do, is really evidence of bad character.”
And he argued that the only relevant thing in Floyd’s death is how he was handled by Chauvin and the other officers.
“What these officers were dealing with is what they were responsible for,” Frank said.
Cahill said he would stop the defense “very quickly” from suggesting at trial that Floyd didn’t deserve sympathy because he used drugs.
“You don’t just dirty up someone who has died in these circumstances as a defense,” he said.
One legal expert said he saw legitimate grounds for Cahill to allow the 2019 arrest at trial given the evidence found in the follow-up searches of the cars. But he said it also could unfairly prejudice the jury against Floyd.
“The problem is, it’s not possible to do one without doing the other,” said Ted Sampsell-jones, a professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law.