George Floyd trial begins
Prosecution urges jury to ‘believe your eyes’ as defence downplays and disputes footage
For nearly a year, the world’s understanding of George Floyd’s death has come mostly from a gruesome video of a white Minneapolis police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. It has become, for many, a painful encapsulation of racism in policing.
But as the murder trial of the officer, Derek Chauvin, opened yesterday, his lawyer attempted to convince jurors there was more to Floyd’s death than the stark video.
The case was about Floyd’s drug use, the lawyer, Eric Nelson, argued. It was about Floyd’s size, his resistance of police officers and his weakened heart, the lawyer said. It was about an increasingly agitated crowd that gathered at an intersection in South Minneapolis, which he said diverted Chauvin’s attention from Floyd, who was black. This, Nelson asserted, was, in part, an overdose, not a police murder.
Prosecutors, however, said that the case was exactly what the video, with its graphic, indelible moments, had revealed. “You can believe your eyes, that it’s homicide,” Jerry Blackwell, one of the prosecutors, told jurors in an opening statement. “It’s murder.”
The clashing approaches came on the first day of the trial in a killing that set off months of protests over racism and police abuse around the world. Floyd’s death, on May 25, also set off unrest that engulfed large portions of Minneapolis, and some residents worry that such scenes could play out again.
Prosecutors began their case by playing for jurors the widely viewed bystander video, but the defence team urged them to look at other issues, adopting a tactic used in the case of Rodney King, who was beaten by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, and in the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer in 2014, with mixed results. The officers in King’s case, who were seen on video kicking him and beating him with batons, were acquitted on state charges but convicted on federal civil rights charges. Jason Van Dyke, an officer whose shooting of McDonald was captured on dashcam video, was convicted of second-degree murder, the most serious charge that Chauvin is now facing.
“Derek Chauvin did exactly what he had been trained to do over the course of his 19-year career,” Nelson told jurors during an opening statement. “The use of force is not attractive, but it is a necessary component of policing.”
The prosecution said it would present reams of evidence that Chauvin violated policy, his training and widely accepted practice.
The video may well be the most explosive evidence in the trial, but medical evidence also appeared likely to play a central role, the lawyers suggested yesterday.
An autopsy report, released shortly after Floyd’s death, classified the death as a homicide and found that the cause was “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint and neck compression” — essentially, that Floyd’s heart stopped because his body was deprived of oxygen following obstructed blood flow, and that the physical restraint by Chauvin was a significant factor. That autopsy, by Dr Andrew Baker, the Hennepin County medical examiner, also found that Floyd had fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system.
Prosecutors said they would present seven additional medical experts to show that the cause of death was asphyxia. Asphyxia would pin the blame more definitively on Chauvin, while cardiopulmonary arrest could be caused by many factors. The defence argued Floyd had died of hypertension, heart disease, drug ingestion and “the adrenaline flowing through his body”.
Nelson, the defence lawyer, also sought to downplay the significance of the video. “There is no political or social cause in this courtroom,” he said. “But the evidence is far greater than nine minutes, 29 seconds.”
There are more than 50,000 pieces of evidence, Nelson said, and authorities interviewed more than 200 civilian witnesses for the case.
Among three witnesses whom prosecutors called to testify yesterday was an emergency dispatcher who observed the arrest on a surveillance video feed and called a police supervisor because she was concerned. The dispatcher, Jena Scurry, said the police were restraining Floyd for so long that she asked someone if the video footage “had frozen”.
For his part, Nelson focused on Floyd’s actions on the evening of his death. Floyd had been accused of using a fake US$20 bill to buy cigarettes from Cup Foods, a convenience store, which led a clerk to call the police. Floyd had taken pills that contained methamphetamine and fentanyl, Nelson said. He fell asleep in his car. He then struggled with police officers, Nelson said.
Once the officers got Floyd to the ground, Nelson asserted, he was still resisting. Floyd was eventually subdued, Nelson said, but he disputed one of the central elements shown in the video — that Chauvin was kneeling on Floyd’s neck.
“Mr Chauvin used his knee to pin Mr Floyd’s left shoulder blade and back to the ground and his right knee to pin Mr Floyd’s left arm to the ground,” he said.
And as he was restraining Floyd, Chauvin and the three other officers on the scene grew wary of the crowd growing around them, and perceived a threat, Nelson said. All four officers were fired by the Police Department shortly after Floyd’s death, and the other three face charges of aiding and abetting second-degree murder.
“There’s more to the scene than just what the officers see in front of them,” he said. “There are people behind them. There are people across the street. There are cars stopping, people yelling.”
The chaotic surroundings caused “the officers to divert their attention from the care of Mr Floyd to the threat that was growing in front of them”, Nelson continued, suggesting they influenced Chauvin’s actions.