Further thoughts on the Chauvin trial and verdict
(1) There seems to be a common notion, based on early reports, that Chauvin and Floyd may have known each other from a previous job. That report was retracted/recanted early on, although I’m going to assume that far more people saw the story than saw the retraction.
(2) Many people are saying that Chauvin should have taken the stand. I disagree. Chauvin’s failure to do so is absolutely standard in trials, even when a person is innocent. Testifying by a defendant opens the door to vicious cross examination by the prosecution and the bringing up of other topics, too. It’s usually a very bad idea. Also, I doubt that Chauvin would have made a good witness for himself. His demeanor is very cold. That doesn’t mean he’s guilty, but juries don’t like it. If the defense had had him testify and he’d been found guilty (I am convinced that he would have been found guilty no matter what), then everyone would be screaming that the defense never should have done it.
(3) I believe that a great many of the limitations of the defense were caused by the difficulty of getting people to work on the case. The atmosphere of fear was present from the start, and courage is not necessarily a common commodity. This goes for lawyers, police, doctors, and other expert witnesses. Why stick your neck out? I don’t think it was possible for Chauvin to get a fair trial anywhere, but Minneapolis was probably the worst possible place in the state for this trial to occur. It had to be in the state of Minnesota, by the way.
(4) This comment from a thread at Legal Insurrection struck me as pretty spot on, except for the part about life imprisonment. Chauvin won’t be getting life imprisonment – at least, that’s not what the rules say, although I suppose anything’s possible (and of course, he also might be killed in prison, although I agree with the writer that he will probably be in some sort of isolation from the general prison population):
…[J]ust like everyone I saw the video in the beginning and was repulsed. But common sense started to make me wonder, like anyone else who uses the tiniest bit of critical thinking skills, ok well if I was going to just say, as a cop, screw this this man is black or a drug addict or whatever, but this time I’ve had enough I’m just going to choke him out and if he dies oh well. None of these other cops, or the ton of idiots screaming at me and taping me, or the paramedics or the doctors when this guy goes to the ER etc. Will ever turn me in because I’m a cop, and a white man, and we get away with openly murdering black people every day. Muh hahaha!
Its something that doesn’t happen. Even if that was a movie plot, you’d be thinking, this is nothing like real life.
Then, the defense more or less proved, everything they were saying about everything except MAYBE being reckless so manslaughter.
As I said in a past post, I’m an ex addict. I can almost GUARANTEE Floyd swallowed his stash not meaning to die but knowing he’d be going to the ER. Then he avoids possession charges,AND going to jail at least in the moment. Every cop or addict knows this happens regularly.
THEN, this whole verdict, zoomed in on Chauvin’s face as if it was the trial of Hitler/Ted Bundy/Satan was ridiculous. Then the crowds crying and sobbing, comparing Floyd to Emmitt Till, this wasn’t even someone these people know!
I’m so creeped out seeing the whole spectacle. Thinking that this dude that at best was just a dick when he’s performing something that happens all the time, cop holds junkie who is freaking out because ambulance is coming. That he probably did hundreds of times. Now gets to live, in basically solitary, in prison, for life. Even serial killers, child murderers etc haven’t been this demonized.
If anyone should have been happy about this its me, someone who lived like Floyd at one point and saw fed up police who were not very kind about junkie drama. But this was wrong. Anyone with a conscience should be very creeped out about this whole thing.
(5) As far as sentencing goes, Here are Andrew Branca’s thoughts on the matter.
(6) If the races had been reversed here (or even if Floyd had been white and the cop white), this case would have been some notations in a file somewhere and perhaps a small article in the local paper, and nothing more.
Liberals don’t have a conscience. Glenn Greenwald does; people like me underestimated him 15 years ago.
Ordinary liberals have sentiment. The more influential the liberal, the more the sentiment is replaced by malice. This is our cultural predicament.
One of the most dispiriting elements of the hysteria surrounding this case and the “show trial” which ensued is how quickly it was racialized, despite there being not one iota of evidence that the race of either Chauvin or Floyd had anything to with the encounter or its outcome. In the new, fundamentally-transformed America of the illegitimate Harris/Biden administration, however, this will be the new modus operandi at the Department of In(Justice) with its grotesquely unqualified leadership (Garland, Monaco, and Gupta, with the equally odious Kristen Clarke perhaps soon to be confirmed).
“Ordinary liberals have sentiment. The more influential the liberal, the more the sentiment is replaced by malice.”
Home run comment, Art.
Reading Scott Johnson at Powerlineblog, I was struck by how many times he commented on the ineptness of the defense lawyer. Off the top of my head:
1. Opening statement began with reasonable doubt, which, according to Scott, is considered weakness right off the bat.
2. the fading 3x lethal dose of fentanyl defense, given that Floyd was hospitalized with a drug overdose recently.
3. Misrepresenting the law to the jury on closing, allowing the prosecution to question counsel’s knowledge or honesty.
One saving grace about the trial as it was conducted was that race was not made a factor. Having said that, I’ve got a feeling that if Chauvin had testified, race would have been front and center. E.g., Chauvin may have testified that he had nothing against Floyd, following which the State would try to impeach by asking Chauvin things like how many times in his life that he’s said the “n-word.” At least we were spared that….
I watched much of the trial. I have little criticism of the defense attorney, especially given the disparity in resources. Nelson did a creditable job, IMO, especially in cross-examination of the State’s experts. Given the riots and publicity, along with how quickly the jury came back, I doubt that the World’s Best defense attorney (whoever it is) would have changed the result. And with all respect to Scott Johnson, I think it’s too easy for one who isn’t carrying the weight of responsibility to criticize those who are carrying that weight.
Reading Scott Johnson at Powerlineblog, I was struck by how many times he commented on the ineptness of the defense lawyer.
Johnson’s other commentary suggests he knows nothing of criminal law or trial practice. Putting a defendant on the stand is a Hail Mary very seldom made use of by defense counsel. Johnson ‘infers guilt’ from what is bog standard in criminal trials.
I looked up Nelson’s professional history. There are about 13,000 working lawyers in Minnesota. You’ll have to scrounge to find one who has devoted more man-hours to criminal defense in private practice than has he. He is the expert about how this is done.
One of the stories of the last six years has been the discovery by we readers of what damaged goods there be among the starboard punditocracy. As in most of them have proven to be tools. I hadn’t to date seen Johnson reveal himself this way. Live and learn.
Neo: “(3) I believe that a great many of the limitations of the defense were caused by the difficulty of getting people to work on the case.”
Although I have no evidence, I strongly suspect this to be true. From the beginning, I thought that the fentanyl overdose evidence, and the recent case where Floyd did the same thing, were critical to the defense. The judge placed limitations on introducing the previous case, but I think that an expert witness could have brought it up. Instead, no toxicologist was called, and the overdose issue was barely discussed by Eric Nelson, the defense attorney.
Although Nelson was competent and courageous, it was painful to watch him working alone against ten or twenty pro bono lawyers working for the state. He was overwhelmed by a mob of savages on the street and by a mob of lawyers in the courtroom. Any lawyer who criticizes Eric Nelson should start with the admission that he was too cowardly to offer Nelson any help. Sadly, I think that includes Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker from Powerline.
Johnnie Cochran and the dream team couldn’t have got acquittal for this case.
All good points, Neo. But, I will add a seventh (which I have mentioned before):
This is an almost perfect example of ‘social justice’ applied in a criminal matter. Derek Chauvin is guilty because of Emmett Till. And the Scottsboro Boys. And the white-lead race riots in Tulsa, Omaha, East St. Louis, and many other places from the 1880s through the 1950s. And slavery, to a certain extent, but that’s in the background here. The dominant theme/imagery regarding most of the police shootings of blacks in the last few years hearkens back to the high tide of lynchings and Jim Crow (again, roughly from the 1880s through the 1950s).
This is how ‘social justice’ works. The facts and context of each specific event, incident and individual matter little, if at all. What matters is the constant, dialectical battle between ‘victims’ and ‘oppressors’. These are defined solely by ‘race’, ‘gender’, ‘orientation’, ‘Immigrant/Refugee status’, in varying degrees of priority, but with race almost always on top.
Expect to see a lot more of criminal social justice. A lot more. We’ve seen hints of it elsewhere; that bartender fellow, Gardner, in Omaha, was a prime (and tragic example) example, the McCloskeys in St. Louis are another. Amy Cooper likely would have been too, had the black man she argued with not been a reasonable person and insisted she didn’t deserve prosecution. There are many other smaller examples.
This is reality, folks. America in 2021.
Fear was the overwhelming factor determining the outcome of the trial. Fear limited the resources on the defense side, in spite of the courage required to present Chauvin’s defense. But it’s not likely that even the most brilliant defense could make the difference. Fear decided the jury verdict. You’d have to be dim enough to be disqualified as a juror not to realize that your actions would determine whether there would be nationwide, maybe worldwide, rioting and violence, including deaths, not to mention endangering your own life and that of your fellow jurors.
Simply put, the mob decided Chauvin’s fate, not his actual guilt. We still don’t know whether he was responsible for the death of George Floyd.
Neo: “(1) There seems to be a common notion, based on early reports, that Chauvin and Floyd may have known each other from a previous job. That report was retracted/recanted early on, although I’m going to assume that far more people saw the story than saw the retraction.”
Yep, count me as one who saw the earlier report but not the retraction. It was that report they may have known each other lead me to believe that Chauvin was doing his “friend” a favor by letting Floyd out of the car when he said he had trouble breathing. For it would have been much better to let the violent guy just sit in the back seat handcuffed instead of letting him out and lying down on the pavement so that he could breath better.
Now that you’ve taught me that was not the case, I do think it was simple compassion on Chauvin’s part to let him out of the car.
OMG! Is this then a case of “no good deed goes unpunished”? The good deed was letting Floyd out of the car to breath better.
pikkumatti:
And yet race was subtext of everything that happened in the trial. I don’t even think there would have been a trial if Floyd had been white.
I agree with your evaluation of Nelson and the trial. And I was shocked at what Johnson wrote about Chauvin’s failure to take the stand. I discussed Johnson’s position on that in this previous comment of mine.
charles:
Agree. They let him out of the car for two reasons, both protective: he said he had claustrophobia and begged to be allowed to lie down on the pavement, and he had been banging his head in the car and hurting himself. And then they restrained him in part to keep him from hurting himself by banging his head on the pavement or something of the sort.
I think that is made quite clear from the transcript of the videocam. I don’t think it was emphasized in the trial, though, and I don’t know why.
I think the only possibly culpable thing Chauvin did was not to turn him over and administer aid when it seemed he stopped breathing. However, I don’t think that killed Floyd, and I think there are possibly benign reasons why Chauvin didn’t do it. One was he may not have realized how bad off Floyd was at this point and was afraid he would get belligerent again. Or hurt himself, if not the cops. Floyd was an enormous man and Chauvin is quite tiny. Also, the crowd was belligerent, and the EMTs were on their way.
I joined a Zoom livestream at Legal Insurrection last night from 8 to 9:30 EDT. William Jacobson and Andrew Branca gave their thoughts. The livestream was recorded and the moderator said it would be available next week. I urge everyone to watch it.
Art Deco:
As I wrote yesterday, I saw that comment of Scott Johnson’s that he infers guilt from failure to take the stand in a criminal trial, and it startled me tremendously.
I am not and never have been a trial lawyer. In fact, I’ve never practiced law. My law degree is almost 50 years old. But even I know that one must never infer guilt from a failure to take the stand. Never, never ever. It’s one of the first things you learn.
To infer guilt from that situation is a human tendency that must be strongly resisted. Failure to do so is to fail our legal system and its focus on protecting the accused, one of its very foundations. To infer guilt from failure to take the stand – and for a lawyer to say he infers it – is profoundly shocking to me, especially for a lawyer on the right.
I cannot explain his position. It is inconceivable to me.
I have liked Johnson’s writing in the past, and this seems very odd to me. My explanation for it is that the Floyd case seems to raise extreme emotions in people, most of whom had their first exposure to it from the video in which Chauvin looks very cold-blooded, and Floyd is pleading. That initial emotional impression could not be overcome, for most people – even people on the right.
What effect did the mask wearing have? Was the jury able to focus on the evidence rather than the physical appearance of everyone? If I was on trial I would take comfort in wearing a mask, knowing that any inadvertent smirk, frown or smile wouldn’t have a chance of being misinterpreted. On the other hand, it’s easier to convict someone who’s behind a mask by masked jurors. Is it harder for attorneys to read the jurors, to insure that they’ve understood a particular point?
JanMN,
Yeah we do know. Chauvin’s knee was apparently at the junction of Floyd’s back and neck. The medical examiner reported no damage to Floyd trachea, not even bruising to his neck. Floyd repeatedly complained of an inability to breathe before he was even on the ground.
Floyd died of a massive drug overdose. Period.
I did watch a large part of the trial. I thought Nelson did as well as he could being it was basically him alone. I strongly suspect that the witnesses he called were the only ones that would agree to testify for the defense. If I were in Nelson’s shoes, I would have tried to recall some of the state’s own witnesses as my experts. One of the things I learned from Branca’s work on this trial is that the cross-examination is limited in Minnesota by what is brought up by direct examination done by the prosecution. By recalling the state’s own experts in the defense, I would think that Nelson would then have leave ask them questions the prosecution refused to open a window on.
But Neo is right- you could have had F. Lee Bailey, Perry Mason, and Clarence Darrow doing the defense and it wouldn’t have made any difference at all. This jury had made up its mind before they were even selected.
George Parry, posting at the American Spectator, says the case was lost the moment the judge denied a change of venue.
No doubt the lack of immediate CPR played into the verdict. But would Chauvin or the other officers know just when Floyd stopped breathing?
And the fentanyl.. one witness said it caused death by restricting the transfer of oxygen from the lungs to the blood stream, and thus a lowering of available oxygen until the organism scummed. What good would it do to perform CPR — artificially moving air into the lungs and artificially causing circulation — when the oxygen in the air taken in was chemically blocked from entering the blood, blocked from getting to the various tissues that required it. CPR would not have helped because the lack of oxygenation of the body was not due, initially, to lack of respiration or circulation.
Another Mike:
It’s not about whether CPR would actually have helped. It’s about how it would have appeared that they were trying.
Welcome to Jim Snow…
Here is a good post on how the prosecution was allowed to make a travesty of the trial, beginning with something I haven’t seen elsewhere about the failure of the non-sequestration of the jurors (which is to me inexplicable; they locked my Dad in the courthouse for 3 days for a penny-ante small-town felony trial in the sixties).
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnrlottjr/2021/04/22/the-derek-chauvin-trial-was-a-travesty-prosecutors-violated-rules-that-protect-us-all-n2588370
It’s a shameful list.
All of the armchair lawyers pontificating about what Nelson messed up should be glad they weren’t the ones sitting in his chair.
Are we still allowed to read Ann Coulter?
https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2021/04/21/thanks-jurors-youre-safe-now-we-arent-n2588347
Scott Johnson faded into the shade as a spectator at the trial.
His critique of Eric Nelson is utterly worthless.
Scott should stick to listening to his Tom Rush records and pining for the days of the hootenanny.