Chauvin prosecutors want tougher penalty
PROSECUTORS are asking a judge to give former police officer Derek Chauvin a more severe penalty than state guidelines call for when he is sentenced in June for George Floyd’s death.
The prosecutors argued in court documents filed on Friday that Mr Floyd was particularly vulnerable and Chauvin abused his authority as a police officer.
Defence lawyer Eric Nelson is opposing a tougher sentence, saying the state failed to prove those aggravating factors, among others, existed when Chauvin arrested Mr
Floyd on May 25.
Chauvin, who is white, was convicted last week of second-degree unintentional murder, thirddegree murder and second-degree manslaughter for pressing his knee against Mr Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes as the black man said he could not breathe and went motionless.
Although he was found guilty of three counts, under Minnesota statutes he will only be sentenced on the most serious one – seconddegree murder. While that count carries a maximum sentence of 40 years, experts say he will receive a term that lengthy.
Prosecutors did not specify how much time they would seek for Chauvin.
Under Minnesota sentencing guidelines, the presumptive sentence for second-degree unintentional murder for someone with no criminal record like Chauvin would be 12 years, six months.
Judges can sentence a person to as little as 10 years and eight months or as much as 15 years and still be within the advisory guideline range. not
The chilling murder of a widow found bound and battered in Cardiff after missing the last bus home remains unsolved almost eight decades on. Cathy Owen reports...
WIDOW Mabel Harper was walking home after missing the last bus when she was brutally murdered at of one of Cardiff’s busiest the side roads.
She was violently gagged, stripped and bound before being killed and, nearly 80 years on, her killer has never been found and it remains one of the city’s most shocking unsolved murders.
It was early on the morning of August 13, 1943, when workers heading to start their morning shift at a local factory discovered the 53-year-old’s bound body under a tree on the grass verge at the side of Western Avenue.
The devoted mum, who was described as a pillar of the community, was found with her clothing torn and her ankles tied together while strips of her clothes had been used to tie her hands behind her back and had been tied around her mouth. Her facial injures were so bad that her dentures had smashed.
Mrs Harper had had to start walking home to Aubrey Avenue, near Victoria Park, after missing the last bus home after visiting her sister’s home in Gelligaer Gardens just off Maindy Road in Cathays.
She had left her sibling’s home at around 10.50pm on the evening of the attack to catch the Whitchurch Road tram that connected with the Ely bus at its junction with North Road and Western Avenue. But she had missed the last bus home and had started to walk the two miles back along the tree-lined Western Avenue.
It was said that the route she would have walked home would have been pitch black because of the wartime blackout in Cardiff. Between 1940 and the final raid on the city in March 1944 approximately 2,100 bombs fell on the city, killing 355 people.
Less than a mile into her walk in the dark Mrs Harper was the victim of a brutal attack that was reported in papers across the country. One newspaper report said she had put up a struggle and that her body had lain at the scene overnight.
Describing the scene, the front page of the South Wales Echo reported: “The body was found over a large patch of blood, which had soaked into the ground, and it is believed that Mrs