Blunt testimony on first day of ex-police officer’s murder trial
Attorneys in the trial of Derek Chauvin presented their case before jurors who will decide the fired Minneapolis officer’s fate in the killing of George Floyd 10 months ago.
MINNEAPOLIS
Derek Chauvin violated his oath as a police officer when he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes and ignored Floyd’s cries for help “until the very life was squeezed out of him,” a prosecutor said Monday as testimony began in the landmark trial set to be a defining moment in the nation’s reckoning over race and policing.
In opening statements, the prosecution and defense presented vastly different pictures of the May 25 scene that ended with the 46-yearold Black man unresponsive beneath the white police officer’s knee on a South Minneapolis street.
Floyd’s death, captured on video, was followed by worldwide protests and weeks of civil unrest in cities across the
country. Many will be closely watching to see whether the long days spent in the streets, in what many called the new civil rights movement, will result in justice not just for Floyd, but for the countless Black Americans who have been abused and killed by police.
Special prosecutor Jerry Blackwell told the jury that Chauvin “didn’t let up” and “didn’t get up” even after Floyd repeatedly complained of struggling to breathe, cried out for his mother and ultimately went limp.
“Derek Chauvin betrayed his badge when he used excessive and unreasonable force upon the body of Mr. George Floyd when he put his knees upon his neck and his back, grinding and crushing him until the very breath — no, ladies and gentlemen — until the very life was squeezed out of him,” Blackwell said. He described Floyd as “defenseless” and “completely in control of the police.” He accused Chauvin of keeping his knee at Floyd’s neck for longer than was necessary.
“When Mr. Floyd was in distress, Mr. Chauvin didn’t help him … [and] he stopped anybody else from being able to help,” Blackwell said, telling the jury that Chauvin wasn’t making “split-second decisions” but a determined choice to remain atop Floyd as he cried out for help and others sought to intervene. “Mr. Chauvin never moves. The knee remains on his neck, sunglasses remain undisturbed on his head, and it just goes on.”
The prosecutor then played for the jury several minutes of the viral bystander video that showed
Chauvin and three other police officers holding
Floyd down as he begged for his life, a video that several jurors told the court they had never seen beyond 30-second clips on the news. “You can believe your eyes,” Blackwell told the jury. “It’s a homicide. It’s murder.”
Behind him, Chauvin, 45, sat at the defense table, occasionally looking up at the video and taking notes on a yellow legal pad. He appeared to be avoiding eye contact with the jury. Chauvin, a 19-year veteran of the Minneapolis Police Department before he was fired in May, has pleaded not guilty to second- and third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s death.
Chauvin’s attorney, Eric Nelson, pushed back against the prosecution, urging jurors to consider the “totality of the circumstances” and to put aside public opinion as they begin to consider the case against his client. “There is no political or social cause in this courtroom,” Nelson said during his roughly 20-minute opening statement. “The evidence is far greater than 9 minutes and 29 seconds.”
Nelson said that Chauvin arrived at the scene at 38th and Chicago to find other officers struggling to place Floyd inside a squad car and that he was following his training as he and the other officers held the man on the ground. He pointed out that Floyd was several inches taller and outweighed his client.
“Derek Chauvin did exactly what he had been trained to do over his 19year career,” Nelson told the jury.
He disputed the prosecution claim that Chauvin was to blame for Floyd’s death, saying the autopsy presented “no telltale signs” of asphyxiation from the officer’s knee. He said he will present evidence that Floyd died from a combination of drug intoxication, heart disease and high blood pressure and that adrenaline rushing through his body from this struggle with police “acted to further compromise an already compromised heart.”
In his autopsy, Hennepin County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker, who is expected to be a key witness in the case, noted the drugs in Floyd’s system, including fentanyl and methamphetamine. But Baker, who ruled Floyd’s death a homicide, listed the cause of death as “cardiopulmonary arrest, complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.”
Floyd’s cause of death is expected to be a key point of contention during the trial. The other three other officers who were at the scene with Chauvin — J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas K. Lane and Tou Thao — are charged with aiding and abetting murder and manslaughter. Those officers, who were also fired, are to stand trial in August.
Shortly before proceedings began Monday morning, several members of Floyd’s family joined their attorney Ben Crump and the Rev. Al Sharpton outside the heavily fortified courthouse for a news conference. At one point, the group knelt in silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds — the initial estimate for how long Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck.
“Today starts a landmark trial that will be a referendum on how far America has come in its quest for equality and justice for all,” Crump said. He pushed back on the idea that this is a “hard case.”
“We know that if George Floyd was a white American citizen, and he suffered this painful, tortuous death with a police officer’s knee on his neck, nobody, nobody, would be saying this is a hard case,” Crump said.
Testimony in the Chauvin case is expected to last about four weeks — with the jury expected to begin deliberations in late April or early May.