Justice — finally — for those long ignored
Conviction in Floyd’s murder shows shift toward accountability
Call it by its name. Murder. For 11 months now, it’s been clear that what former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd on May 25 wasn’t mere negligence. It wasn’t a tragic accident. It wasn’t a mistake, misunderstanding or mere manslaughter. It was murder.
Now it’s official. On Tuesday, a Hennepin County jury finally returned guilty verdicts on charges of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and thirddegree manslaughter.
America let out a collective breath, from Minneapolis to the streets of Third Ward, Floyd’s old neighborhood where cars honked and drivers with raised fists yelled “Floyd” out their windows.
Yet, we know there is so much work to be done to make the killing of unarmed Black men and women at the hands of police stop. It is a pathology that has not abated in the year since the deaths of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and Floyd in Minneapolis shocked the nation. Since 2015, when the Washington Post began keeping count, hundreds of Black men have perished at the hands of police officers, many of them unarmed. Since January of last year, at least 21 men known to be unarmed were killed.
Even so, the convictions represent a powerful moment, one Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg called “a defining moment in American criminal justice.”
For so many long years, the killings of Black men in the custody of white police officers in cities all over America have routinely resulted in acquittals, excuses and, at best, secondary or lesser charges. This time, prosecutors, the courts and the jury all did the right thing in convicting Chauvin, whose extraordinary callousness was on display for all to see on the viral video of him kneeling for minute after murderous minute on Floyd’s neck as the former Houston resident lay face down on the pavement, handcuffed, and repeating 27 times “I can’t breathe.”
Questions about his sentence remain — and appeals are expected — but those issues are for another day. On Tuesday, America got something that approximated justice, and that’s worth saluting.
“George Floyd mattered,” lead prosecutor Keith Ellison said after the verdict. “He mattered because he’s a human being.”
The verdict was bittersweet for some in Houston’s Third Ward, where Floyd grew up and where many old friends had gathered Tuesday. “We’re still mad he’s gone; that’s our brother,” Christopher Hutchins, 39, who knew Floyd since he was 5, told the editorial board just after the verdict came down. “He’s not here. But Lord gave him justice.”
Justice in a sense, but Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, cautioned against the word because no jury can restore Floyd’s life. “But accountability,” he said, “and accountability is the first step toward justice.”
The verdict is the latest example of a slow shift in the way prosecutors, courts and juries are responding to cases involving police killings of unarmed victims, which disproportionately involve Black men or boys and white officers. Dallas County juries have twice convicted police officers on murder charges in the past four years. Another officer is awaiting trial there, and so is one in next-door Tarrant County. And last month, a grand jury indicted an officer in Austin on two counts of murder, the first such case in the department’s history.
Two officers in Houston await their own murder trials, charged in the death of a married couple whose Harding Street house they raided in 2019.
These kinds of indictments, never mind convictions, used to be all but unheard of.
“This was the trial of the century for us,” U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, who was in Minneapolis with the family for closing arguments earlier this week, told the board. When the news broke Tuesday in Washington, she said members from all over the country cried on the House floor.
The House has already passed a bill Jackson Lee co-sponsored, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — but its prospects in the Senate remain cloudy. She said she’s working with Sen. Cory Booker to bring a Senate version to the floor. “There should be no excuse for anyone, for Republicans, for my fellow Democrats, for my two senators from Texas in not voting for a bill that enhances police-community relations as my bill does.”
The reform efforts underway in Austin are no closer to yielding concrete results.
State Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, told the board Tuesday that efforts at a broadbased bill named in honor of Floyd were dead on arrival this session but that he and state Sen. Borris Miles, D-Houston, and others have pushed standalone measures, three of which West believes will pass the Senate. They would ban chokeholds, require officers to intervene when they see a colleague endangering someone in custody, and create a statewide duty for police to render aid when someone is in medical crisis.
He offered no prediction on whether they’d pass the House, saying only, “I’ve got to be optimistic.”
Such needed legislation shouldn’t require optimism to pass, only a clear-eyed look at reality — specifically the 9 minutes and 29 seconds of horrifying video that showed the world what Black people have endured for more than a century at the hands of law enforcement sworn to protect them.
Leaders, in Washington, Austin and here in Houston, must seize this moment to give some meaning at least to the tragic deaths that have galvanized the nation. The vast majority of reforms suggested by Mayor Sylvester Turner’s task force have yet to become policy or even get a full hearing by City Council.
“It was a murder, in the full light of day, and it ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see,” President Biden said Tuesday evening.
What we saw was horrifying. What we saw is reality in America — until we change it.