Pro: Chauvin justified in kneeling on cuffed Floyd
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was “justified” when he knelt on George Floyd’s neck as he arrested him over a suspected counterfeit bill last spring, an expert defense witness testified Tuesday in the ex-cop’s murder trial.
Barry Brodd, a police defense tactics trainer and former officer in Santa Rosa, Calif., said Chauvin was “objectively reasonable” and followed police training in the May 25 incident.
“It’s easy to sit and judge on an officer’s conduct,” he told the jury. “It’s more of a challenge to, again, put yourself in the officer’s shoes to try to make an evaluation through what they’re feeling, what they’re sensing, the fear they have, and then make a determination.”
Brodd’s testimony on the first day of Chauvin’s defense presentation contradicted multiple prosecution witnesses — including the Minneapolis police chief — who have testified in the last two weeks that Chauvin’s actions were an unnecessary and dangerous use of deadly force.
Prosecutors argue Floyd died from low oxygen levels after Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes and ignored the handcuffed Black man’s repeated pleas that he couldn’t breathe.
But the defense claims Chauvin did “exactly” what he was trained to do and that Floyd died because of his drug use and underlying health conditions.
Defense attorney Eric Nelson has also sought to portray the group of bystanders on the scene as aggressive and threatening, which would have taken Chauvin’s attention away from Floyd.
Brodd backed up those claims, telling the jury that Chauvin had to deal with a large and vocal “crowd” while Floyd was “somewhat resisting.”
He also said possible drug use has “quite a large impact” on a suspect’s behavior and can give them “superhuman strength.” In addition, he said, officers do not have to fight fair if they feel there’s a risk of harm to them.
“I can’t imagine how many times I’ve been exposed to — personally or seen other officers dealing with — a simple thing as a traffic stop or a jaywalking violation or some minor offense and they end up in a fight for their life,” Brodd told the court.
Under cross-examination, Brodd reluctantly agreed with some of the prosecution’s arguments. He admitted that holding Floyd in the prone position “could be a use of force,” contradicting his earlier testimony, and that doing so could increase the risk of positional asphyxia.
Brodd testified for the defense in the 2018 trial of Jason Van Dyke, a former Chicago police officer who was convicted of murder in the shooting death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
Chauvin’s defense began its case Tuesday by showing the jury a short clip from Floyd’s 2019 drug arrest — more than a year before his deadly police encounter.
Former narcotics investigator Scott Creighton told the jury Floyd was the passenger in a car that police stopped that day and was “unresponsive and noncompliant” to his commands.
Shawanda Hill, who was with Floyd moments before he died, said Floyd offered her a ride home on May 25 after they ran into each other at the Cup Foods convenience store where he was accused of passing a $20 counterfeit bill.
Asked to describe her friend’s behavior that day, she told the jury he was “happy, normal, talking, alert.”
The pair then got into his parked SUV, along with another friend, and talked for several minutes before Hill got a phone call, she said. At that point, Hill testified, Floyd fell asleep and was still asleep when two store employees approached the car to confront him about the fake bill.
“I tried to wake him up over and over,” she said.
Floyd, who was later found with fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system, eventually woke up and “nodded back off” a couple times until police arrived on the scene, Hill told the jury.
Under cross-examination by prosecutor Matthew Frank, Hill described Floyd’s frightening reaction when cops approached his car.
“He instantly grabbed the wheel, and he was like, ‘Please, please, don’t kill me! Please, please, don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me! What did I do? Please tell me what I did,’ ” she recalled during her testimony.