SETTLEMENT
Floyd was declared dead on May 25 after Derek Chauvin, who is white, pressed his knee against his neck for about nine minutes. Floyd’s death sparked sometimes violent protests in Minneapolis and beyond and led to a national reckoning on racial justice.
City Council President Lisa Bender choked up as she addressed a news conference about the settlement, saying she knew “no amount of money” could bring Floyd back.
“I just want you to know how deeply we are with you,” she said to Floyd’s family members.
Floyd’s family filed the federal civil rights lawsuit in July against the city, Chauvin and three other fired officers charged in his death. It alleged the officers violated Floyd’s rights when they restrained him, and that the city allowed a culture of excessive force, racism and impunity to flourish in its police force.
In 2019, Minneapolis agreed to pay $20 million to the family of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, an unarmed woman who was shot by an officer after she called 911 to report hearing a possible crime happening behind her home, to settle her family’s civil rights lawsuit. Damond was white.
It wasn’t immediately clear how the settlement might affect the trial or the jury now being seated to hear it. Crump said the settlement is a way “to help shape what justice looks like” rather than waiting for a result from a legal system that many Blacks distrust.
“The one thing we know as Black people ... is there is no guarantee that a police officer will be convicted for killing a Black person unjustly in our country,” Crump said. “That’s what history has taught us.”
Stewart said the civil case “doesn’t have anything to do with” the trial.
“Justice doesn’t really wait,” he said. “It happens when it happens and it happened today.”
Ted Sampsell-Jones, a criminal law expert at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, said it’s additional pretrial publicity that is “bad for the defense” and could lead some jurors to think guilt has already been decided.
“However, this ultimately should not affect the criminal case,” Sampsell-Jones said. “There has already been a ton of pretrial publicity — some of it bad for the prosecution, some of it bad for the defense. All we can do is hope that the jurors will follow Judge Cahill’s instructions and decide the case based solely on the evidence presented at trial.”
Crump and others at the news conference called for any protests during Chauvin’s trial to be peaceful. Minneapolis is on edge for potential violence if Chauvin is acquitted, with concrete barriers, fencing and barbed wire encircling the courthouse and the National Guard already mobilized.
Meanwhile, another potential juror was dismissed Friday after she acknowledged having a negative view of the defendant.
The woman, a recent college graduate, said she had seen bystander video of Floyd’s arrest and closely read news coverage of the case. In response to a jury pool questionnaire, she said she had a “somewhat negative” view of Chauvin and that she thought he held his knee to Floyd’s neck for too long.