The death of George Floyd was an act of murder, plain and simple
“Get off of his neck.” “Please! Please!” “I can’t breathe.” Police in America have far too many non-lethal ways to reliably kill black men without facing criminal charges. The weaponization of racism does not require a gun or a bullet. In this case, a police officer’s knee was the weapon used to kill George Floyd. The observing officers’ indifference was also a weapon used to kill Floyd, and the Minneapolis police department’s failure to arrest the officers responsible is a weapon threatening to kill our most basic sense of justice.
Most law enforcement agencies classify weapons and use of physical force into two broad categories: “lethal” and “non-lethal”. Officers regularly convert “non-lethal” weapons and physical force into deadly force and hide behind the agency’s classification system to avoid criminal charges.
In reality, any weapon or any use of physical force can cause death when misused. Police batons kill people. Tasers kill people. Chokeholds kill people. Kneeling on someone’s neck for eight minutes kills people. You don’t need to attend the police academy to know that if you obstruct someone’s airway they will eventually stop breathing, and if you cannot breathe you will die.
Mike Freeman, the district attorney, is required by the laws of the state of Minnesota to charge the police officer who kneeled on Floyd’s neck with first-degree murder. Similarly, the officers who watched their fellow officer do it, failed to intervene and stopped other citizens from trying to save Floyd’s life should also be charged.
The officers served as judge, jury and executioners of George Floyd when they killed him in the street; and they should face life sentences for First-Degree Murder in a court of law. A first-degree murder charge in Minnesota requires that a person acts to “cause the death of a human being with premeditation and with intent to effect the death of the person”.
The video evidence clearly shows that the officers acted with the intent to kill and with premeditation. Floyd
told the officers he could not breathe 12 times, including within the first few seconds of the video. Floyd said: “I’m about to die … they’re gonna kill me,” and called out for his mother. He lost consciousness, stopped breathing and his body went limp after four minutes. Forty seconds later witnesses told officers that Floyd was unresponsive. At least 16 times they asked the officers to take his pulse.
The officers even prevented a woman who identified herself as an EMT from trying to save his life. Two minutes and 20 seconds after Floyd lost consciousness, witnesses began to say: “They just killed him.” The officers all knew that Floyd was unconscious, was not breathing, that his body was limp, but an officer kept his knee pressed on his windpipe, making sure he did not breathe for another four minutes, despite witnesses’ relentless insistence that he was dying. If the witnesses knew he was dying, the officers knew he was dying. The officers knew that Floyd needed oxygen to live, but they never attempted CPR, never took his pulse and never tried to save his life.
Racism is the eye staring down the barrel of our justice system and threatening to pull the trigger. Recall that only after a mass protest movement did the officer who killed Eric Garner in a chokehold face any consequences.
Freeman cannot allow the Minneapolis police officers who killed Floyd to elude criminal charges under the weak, shameful excuse that the level of force used was “non-lethal”, or that the officers didn’t know that Floyd would die without oxygen. That argument is as dishonest as saying they didn’t know what happens to a fish out of water. We can all visualize that image: the fish out of water, its mouth open and gasping for air; and we all know the fish is going to die, just like the officers knew that Floyd was going to die.
We encourage people to call Mike Freeman at (612) 348-5550 and demand that the officers involved in killing George Floyd be charged with firstdegree murder.
Ben Crump is a civil rights attorney and founder of the national law firm Ben Crump Law. Crump is representing the Floyd family
Jasmine Rand, a civil rights attorney who has worked on numerous police brutality cases, is also representing the Floyd family
rage. The fact that even a handful of Republicans have expressed mild regret at Trump’s bizarre accusation only underscores that it has served its instrumental purpose. For the moment, the news cycle is consumed not with the fact that 100,000 Americans have died in a pandemic that the White House recklessly insisted posed no threat; instead, all attention is riveted on the spectacle of a sitting president accusing an opponent in the “lame stream media” of homicide.
Trump’s attack on mail-in ballots, by contrast, is far more ominous. Here, the president is defaming not an individual but the integrity of our electoral process, confidence in which is a key to a stable democratic order. And the purpose of this attack is not distraction but pointedly political. The politics of disenfranchisement has emerged as a staple of Republican electoral strategy, and the reasons for targeting mail-in ballots are not hard to divine. The bulk of such ballots are cast in urban areas, where Democratic voters predominate, and as the nation continues to grapple with the Covid-19 outbreak, we can expect millions of urban voters to cast mail-in ballots in November as a hedge against the obvious health risks that come with in-person voting. Trump’s tweets serve, then, the politics of voter suppression.
But that is only one aspect of the dark logic behind the tweets. Far more alarmingly, Trump’s attack on the reliability of mail-in votes establishes the groundwork for a radical refusal to acknowledge electoral defeat. In contrast to ballots cast in-person on 3 November, mail-in ballots often cannot be fully counted until several days after the election. This means that in a very tight race, the results announced on election day may be no more than provisional; and second, because of the demographic patterns I mentioned above, the full counting of ballots may well swing the outcome in the favor of Democratic candidates.
The 2018 Arizona senatorial race witnessed a particularly dramatic case of this effect, dubbed the “blue shift” by election law expert Ned Foley. On election day, Martha McSally, the Republican candidate, enjoyed a 15,000-vote lead over her Democratic rival, Kyrsten Sinema. By the time the state’s canvassing had ended, however, McSally found herself defeated by Sinema by some 56,000 votes – a swing of 71,000 thousand votes.
Trump is more than familiar with the phenomenon of blue shift. Also in 2018, when the senatorial race in Florida saw Republican Rick Scott’s lead over Bill Nelson shrink from over 56,000 on election day to an uncomfortable 10,000 by the time the state completed its canvass, Trump had urgently tweeted:
Recall that in 2016, Trump’s margin of victory over Hillary Clinton was a combined 70,000 votes in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is more than possible that Trump could narrowly capture these states on 3 November, only to see his victory vanish as mail-in ballots are tallied in the days following the election. His tweet from Tuesday tells us how he would respond to such a loss. He will reject it as a product of fraud. That is an eventuality – or even a certainty – that the nation must prepare itself for.
Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020, published by Twelve/Hachette on 19 May. Douglas holds the James J Grosfeld chair in law, jurisprudence and social thought, at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and is also a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US.
no one that China is filling the vacuum. The US does not lack the economic or financial power to sustain its 75-year leadership of the international order. But under Trump, it has forgotten why that leadership position is important, and is flushing its power – and its reputation – down the drain.
• Jeffrey Frankel is a professor at Harvard University’s John
F Kennedy School of Government. He served as a member of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers
© Project Syndicate