There’s a bid to vacate Chauvin’s state conviction
Prediction: it won’t succeed.
Opinion: it absolutely should succeed.
In the petition, Joseph argued that Gov. Tim Walz broke the law in reassigning authority of the case to Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office, making Ellison’s involvement illegitimate. The petition also claimed “there was no medical evidence to support the bogus theory of ‘asphyxia’ advanced by the state,” and that the Hennepin County District Court should have convened a grand jury before charging Chauvin. …
Chauvin first filed a petition to overturn his conviction in 2023, stating that he would not have pled guilty if his attorney told him that a pathologist offered to testify that Chauvin didn’t cause Floyd’s death. The courts denied his petition. Chauvin and Joseph returned in 2025 requesting another review of his case, arguing his rights were violated by faulty testimony and jury instructions. The courts dismissed that petition, as well.
There also have been several appeals; none have been granted. The bases for the appeals rested mainly on the following:
… that Chauvin wasn’t given a fair trial due to intensive pretrial media coverage over riots and civil unrest around the globe that followed Floyd’s killing; that the jury should have been sequestered during the trial; and that the trial should have been held outside of Hennepin County due to bias in the jury pool.
Once a person is sentenced, the bar is set very high for revisiting the issues and granting such requests. I believe that in the Chauvin case the requirements have been met, but it doesn’t surprise me that Chauvin has had no success in these efforts. I’ve written an enormous number of posts on George Floyd’s death and the Chauvin trial, so I won’t recap the details except to say that I’m with Elon Musk here:
“The facts show that [Chauvin] was not the cause of death, nor did he at any time intend for a death to occur,” Musk’s social media post read. “Whatever else he may be, he is not a murderer. That is the truth.”
Thank you for this post, Neo. The Chauvin case is an egregious injustice, (maybe comparable to the Dreyfus affair?)
In the fifties, Republicans warned (correctly) of Communist infiltration of our government. The anti-Communists were later ridiculed and marginalized. Today, Communist-Fascist-Democrats have taken over ~ 50% or more of our government.
This case and the BS lawfare against Trump have badly damaged their whole profession. Good grief, the E Jean Carol case is an obscenity. I expect retribution against them by the next president. If I were POTUS, any of them that obstructed my Article II powers would be treated as an insurgent.
Damn commies think killing 40+ million people to create their commie utopia is ok. I don’t know why they don’t think the normies might decide killing 40 million commies to create their commie free utopia might be the response.
Does anyone know: It was alleged that the police chief lied on the standing when she testified that the hold Chauvin used was not part of the department’s standard procedure when it actually was. Was this issue raised either on direct appeal or in one of the past post-conviction petitions? (In which case, even such an egregious issue apparently did not persuade the court. Or the allegation was simply untrue.) Or is perhaps part of the present petition?
Btw, courts especially frown on “successive” postconviction petitions. You need to come up with all your issues at the first opportunity. Any new issue would have to have been unknowable at the first round.
I hope that Chauvin prevails – but I don’t have high hopes.
What I really remember of this incident is it was one of the elements of my deciding not to be police any more. In my interpretation, Chauvin could have been any of us and the only reason it wasn’t me was dumb luck. Like MN, I am confident the DPRofMA would also have rushed out to my public hanging to placate the crowd of noisemakers. Not enough benefit to offset the risk, at all.
Considering the lack of interest by the Just and Righteous in the death of Justine Damond…or many other cases, there’s no reason to think Chauvin will get anything approaching a fair hearing. They’re interested in what they’re interested in, an to hell with morality and law.
My youngest daughter graduated from the University of Minnesota law school this year. I can tell you with a high degree of legal certainty that many on the law faculty are teaching liberal political theory and not the law.
A Professor Akbar favors abolishing prisons. The Dean calls it the abolitionist movement. Akbar teaches criminal law.
Many of the law students actively opposed ICE’s enforcement of federal law. The Dean and many professors celebrated it. I called them out as Confederates.
The Hennepin County Attorney didn’t enforce federal law. All sorts of people looked aside when Somalis were stealing millions.
Minnesota is a lawless state.
I hope Chauvin’s lawyer has it right re appointing the AG. In NE, the AG has the ability to help prosecute murder cases because many NE County Attorneys are part time and have no experience in prosecuting murders. And there is a state public defender for the same reason.
I’m driving to Deuel County, Nebraska on Monday. The population is 1,800.
The jury, trail court judge and all the appellate judges knew that if they found Chauvin not guilty, the mob would have killed them or gone over to their houses and burned them down. The mob had the courthouse surrounded. The trial should have been conducted in Duluth in January.
Summary of Prof. Akbar below. Collective care my ass. Criminals would run wild.
The “Abolitionist Horizon”: Rather than viewing “abolition” as an overnight erasure, Akbar frames it as a strategic, forward-looking path—an “abolitionist horizon”. This perspective uses reform not to fix policing, but as a deliberate strategy to step-by-step diminish the scale, scope, resources, and legitimacy of the carceral state.
Shifting to Collective Care: True public safety, from an abolitionist framework, requires defunding the police and shifting those public resources into building robust modes of social provision and community care—such as affordable housing, mental health infrastructure, healthcare, and non-carceral accountability
If MN law requires a grand jury indictment, and there wasn’t one, then the appeal should succeed — if it weren’t Minnesota, where laws seem to be enforced as optional suggestions. The Chauvin case was a gross miscarriage of justice.
No, they weren’t afraid of the mob. They’re just malevolent people.
No, they weren’t afraid of the mob. They’re just malevolent people.
Not either/or; both.
The Chauvin conviction is and was a travesty. In the videos, Chauvin is not putting pressure on the druggy Floyd. Floyd died of a drug overdose, was already in the arms of Satan when Chauvin encountered him. I saw it then and have not changed my mind!
Just another reason, besides Walz, to stay out of Minnesota, with Minneapolis/St. Paul, the Twin Cities, a bizzaro place. Upstate MN has a population that hunts and fishes, fine people, but they are only 45% of the state’s population.
Correction/amendment to my comment. It should read ” ‘Chauvin is not putting pressure’ on Floyd’s trachea; his knee is correctly placed on Floyd’s neck lateral to midline structures such as the trachea (aka windpipe)”. Video clearly shows this.
Ahh, haste!
The autopsy reports also indicated his trachea was uninjured. And that the level of fentanyl in his femoral blood was midrange for what you would expect from an overdose death. And the state’s forensic pathologists admitted on the stand they’d have attributed his death to a fentanyl overdose or coronary artery disease had he been found in a hotel room.
==
Please note how the judge rigged the jury selection in favor of the prosecution. He refused to excuse anyone for cause and just added additional peremptories for each side to use, which allowed the prosecution to exclude anyone in the pool who might not have it in for Chauvin. Result: the only white male on the jury was a man in his 20s. The ratio of blacks to others on the jury (0.50) was nearly 4x the mean for the population of Hennepin County (0.13). Chauvin would have been better off if they pulled 16 names out of the box and impaneled them without any voir dire.
“I don’t know why they don’t think the normies might decide killing 40 million commies to create their commie free utopia might be the response. Chases Eagles
Revocation of citizenship and mandatory deportation for all but the top political and financial leadership. Prison terms and for those who fomented violence… public execution.
Former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom responded to WNBA player Natasha Cloud after she criticized America as “trash”.
“Calling America trash huh? Let me know when your season is over, I’ll buy your ticket and we can go together to countries like China, Russia, IRAN, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, & Turkey. Forget about calling them trash, I would like to see if you can even criticize those regimes!! … People have NO idea how lucky and blessed they are to be in a country like America. I’m not saying America is perfect, but trust me, you don’t wanna see the other side.”
If ever anyone got a raw deal, it was Derek Chauvin.
Prayers.
I just hope Chauvin lives long enough to see justice prevail.
The Chauvin trial was peak woke insanity. Wildly and obviously criminally unfair, not just to him, by the way, but to his fellow police officers who were tried as well.
I could care less now what bad things happen to Minnesota. Its citizens brought all of the dysfunction on themselves by voting in the most corrupt government in America. And that’s a high hurdle considering the likes of California, Illinois and several other Blue states.
Art Deco says “ No, they weren’t afraid of the mob. They’re just malevolent people.” AGREED. Except, it’s epidemic there. Not at all exceptional.
I became an ex-Minnesotan in the 1980s. And it’s been a state going downhill after Governor’s like ex-wrestler turned actor (and then crank) Jessie Ventura and Tim Penny, a respectable and sensible D in the US House for the Southern District of Minnesota, lost for Governor in 2002.
So. How does Iowa stay R so long? While Minnesota competes with Commiefornia?
Cornhead. Thanks for the report on University of Minnesota Law School’s collapse.
Like in Doctoring and child mutilations taught at the Med School, STILL, I suspected as much. I shall advance your report to my sister and Gypsy Stat’s Prof Mike, still based there.
As Instapundit reminded us last week or more, we’re living Robert Heinline’s crazy world, where standards are inverted by the corrupt elites, en mass.
Survival becomes our highest virtue now. Just surviving,
Cornhead— Except it’s not “liberal” law taught at U of M Law School. It’s nihilist neoMarxist CRT destructionism as “justice” [ REALLY, “Just-us” Wokocrats) that’s getting taught. Around the country.
For your daughter’s information. I noticed that William Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection is hiring a new lawyer to fight CRT with research and lawsuits. Competitive compensation. Remote workable. Only 5%+ travel expected.
Your observant daughter looks pre-qualified, if she’s motivated to do it.
See LegalInsurrection.com, RIGHT SIDEBAR for the LINK!
Neo — perhaps you’d be kind enough to forward this notice to Cornhead?
PS Congratulations to your daughter. Too.
Greater Minneapolis is crazy blue. The rest of the state is not.
Art Deco-But not even the rural non-metro area can agree to support anything but a GOP squish. So, they get quashed by the Machine CommieKKKrats.
They lack the moral fibre to win and rule with vigor. So they tolerate tyranny. Look at the Powerlineblog.com folks. Same problem there.
I try not to think about Chauvin and the other officers because the injustice crushes me.
If you believe in malevolent forces, it is hard not to see them at work in the catastrophic events starting in 2019 with Covid escaping from a laboratory that should have never been developing such a virus to begin with. There’s a direct path from there to covert government tyranny, lockdowns, media collusion, societal breakdown, joblessness, simmering panic, and then the explosion and madness and riots in May begun by Floyd’s death.
Even the sequence of events leading to Floyd’s death was incredibly bad luck. The officers were trying to work with him and were treating him decently. They called for an ambulance that was only a minute or two away but somehow, in this day and age of GPS, the ambulance kept being directed to the wrong address and so did not arrive until after the crowd witnessed Floyd go unconscious. If the ambulance had gotten there even two or three minutes sooner, none of this would have happened. If a crowd had not gathered and began yelling at Chauvin, he might not have been so determined to not double-check on Floyd’s condition.
If it wasn’t Minneapolis, the authorities might have responded in a partisan manner and might have ensured a more fair trial.
In re defunding and reducing police forces:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/7a587e937781f56b81499aec89dc18a0e7803a74da4c36c209a72493be4657e7.png
Bonus, because they are associated topics:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/1937582491523096576.jpg