As you have probably heard by now former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been found guilty on all counts in the killing of George Floyd.
What’s next?
I think we’re all waiting on tenterhooks to see if there’s civil disorder in Minneapolis or anywhere else. Tensions are visibly running pretty high here in Chicago. I also don’t see how the other officers involved in the incident will escape indictment.
I have to confess I paid little attention. I do have two “technical” questions. Were these addressed in testimony?
1. Why would Floyd’s blood oxygen level be .98 if he was asphyxiated?
2. Did they explain why the other officers did not participate in restraining Floyd rather than having Chauvin go 9 minutes.
If the traditional Police Union Teflon is stripped away from officers, will we be able to hire any?
(Derek Chauvin’s knee was pressed so tightly into Floyd’s neck, the oxygen could not escape).
“Derek Chauvin’s knee was pressed so tightly into Floyd’s neck, the oxygen could not escape.”
I’m not a physiologist etc, but I doubt it. The oxygen must react chemically very swiftly in the body. Its not “trapped.”
Need to know details but assume they are talking about when he was being resuscitated and they stopped to pronounce him dead. Especially with compression devices like the LUCAS machine you can have very good cardiac outputs and normal O2sat in someone who is dead. Think of all the organ donors if that helps. They are brain dead but you can keep them going for a while and they usually have pretty normal O2Sats, albeit with supplemental O2 most of the time.
Steve
What you are really saying is that the 98 “sat†is a bogus statistic. At the time of Floyd crossing the Rubicon it might have been low, but after that they pumped him up during resuscitation, then measured. Surely some doctor witness must have made this point.
The brain dead example seems inoperative.
Last night, for the first time in a long while, I decided to observe commentary on TV. A true disappointment. In particular the President, who truly beclowned himself. I thought, in this country we use the justice system to try individuals, not movements or classes of individuals. The dangers should be obvious. Then I saw the essay linked below. Here is a relevant snippet:
“Derek Chauvin is not a nice man. He is callous, egocentric, and has a record of excessive use of force complaints. In my view, the Democrats in charge of the Minneapolis police force should have fired him long ago. But that doesn’t mean he murdered George Floyd. Our system of justice depends on judging each case on its merits.
Anyone watching the actual testimony of witnesses and experts would know that the issues in the case were complex, technical and contested. It would have taken days if not weeks for an open-minded jury to determine whether Chauvin was guilty or not. No one respectful of all the attention put on this case by experts and witnesses on both sides, would consider that the three contradictory charges could be lumped together. Only people frightened of disappointing the lynch mob could make that mistake. But the jury was uninterested in the evidence.
Did Chauvin murder Floyd? Murder requires intention. If you believe, like President Biden, that Chauvin murdered Floyd, then you have to believe that an officer of the law, in possession of his faculties, would choose to murder an individual while dozens of cameras – many of them hostile – filmed the event. No one in his or her right mind actually believes this, but virtually everybody and every commentator immediately went on record saying they had no problem with the verdict. Dissenters seemed only to have problems with the lynch mob behavior, as though that didn’t corrupt the whole process, verdict included.”
As someone around here likes to say, “read the whole thing.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/verdict-david-horowitz/
“Derek Chauvin’s knee was pressed so tightly into Floyd’s neck, the oxygen could not escape”
It is hard to imagine a more idiotic statement. For shame!
It appears the trial judge may two fundamental mistakes: not granting a change of venue; and worse, not sequestering the jury. I expect a retrial is ordered on appeal.
I don’t second guess jury decisions. Early on in the trial I expressed my opinion, based on reading the relevant Minnesota statutes and what I had seen and heard in the media, that Mr. Chauvin was guilty of third degree murder.
I was not on the jury or in the courtroom so I can’t say whether they decided rightly or wrongly. I will say two things. First, there will undoubtedly be appeals and the appeals process will undoubtedly go on for years.
And second whatever happens Derek Chauvin’s life as he knew it is over.
Uhhh, no, the brain dead thing is probably correct. The O2Sat at the time when they called the code and stopped is not especially relevant except that as I understand it the defense introduced the idea of carbon monoxide poisoning (and it also mostly rules out massive heart failure). It was bizarre of the defense to bring up CO poisoning as you just wouldnt get high enough concentrations out in the open, but a normal O2Sat doesnt really rule it out either. A pulse oximeter can be fooled (it doesnt directly measure saturation) and you need to check a carboxyhemoglobin level. A normal O2Sat by oximetry probably makes it a bit less likely it was CO poisoning but you really need the blood test to be sure.
Steve
I am not a psychic, but I knew way ahead of the ultimate verdict that Chauvin was toast. He had to be convicted, driven by the demands of the race-obsessed party now governing this country, along with their support staff of corporate news and social media who carefully screen the information they want to reach the public’s eyes and ears.
Consequently, we are currently at the mercy of the Marxist-founded, well financed BLM mob, while being force-fed the 1619 version of American history, along with Critical Race Theory, in order to drill down on and tightly fasten the validity of systemic racism into people’s head. Book ends to Biden’s political aspirations is the emphasis on climate change and Xi’s proclamation of wanting a “new world order,†which would hand power exclusively over to the elites.
It’s a bleak future for the U.S. if the Dems ruthless means achieve the ends they desperately want……
I guess I need to specify when my tongue is in my cheek.
You should be able to believe Chauvin could do that if you believe,, like the jury, that the diminutive officers bony knee had the power to prevent the muscular Floyd not only from breathing, but from making any effort to breathe.
We are asked to imagine Floyd as healthy, yet flaccid and supine. Not after an exhausting struggle, but after deliberately lying down despite the efforts of four officers to keep him erect.
The only way this makes sense is if Floyd were already in a rapid state of physical decline, a state unknown to the officers.
Further, from the video, it appears to me Chauvin was angered and distracted by the violent mob gathering across the street. He should have been aware of Floyd’s precarious condition yet made a point of looking to the sky as if bored.
I would have found him guilty of negligent homicide for that reason. But murder? No.
Side note. He cannot be stripped of his pension and that may be all he has left.
Something that should happen in the aftermath of this case but probably won’t is that we need to revisit the height requirements for police officers. At 5’9″ Chauvin clearly had some difficulty in dealing with the 6’4″ Floyd.
When officers are smaller there are circumstances when they must use more force and after a period of years use-of-force becomes a culture. IMO it’s fair to conclude that the experiment with smaller police officers has not only flopped, it’s had serious unforeseen adverse effects.
I say this as someone who a) taught self-defense for many years and b) has been in the situation of facing a much bigger opponent. A good small man can defeat a less-than-good large man but you have to be a lot better, you have to be in better shape, and it can take a lot of effort.
And that brings me to the Capitol Police. One of the conclusions that I hope will be drawn but probably won’t is that the CP has a lot of old, sick officers. They start old (as I have pointed out) and unsurprisingly get older. As they age they aren’t re-evaluated. That’s a real error.
I agree with you, Gray, that negligent homicide suited his actions a lot more than the charges rained on him by what I think was a fearful, intimidated jury. Furthermore, of the 3 charges formally filed against Chauvin, manslaughter was by far the most applicable.
As an afterthought to the whole Floyd event – from beginning to end – I can’t help but compare and contrast his death with Ashli Babbitt’s, as to how it was publicized and legally handled.
Floyd, who overdosed and almost died a few weeks earlier, had a long criminal record, was still operating outside of the law, was a huge man resisting arrest, became an overnight saint, feted as a victim of police brutality, family paid a compensatory $27 million, with a policeman (Chauvin) identified, overcharged and convicted of homicide in his death.
Babbitt, OTOH, was a 14 year Air Force veteran having multiple overseas deployments in intelligence, was a petite, unarmed woman participating in a protest, and shot point blank, without warning, by a plainclothes policeman. The shooter has remained unnamed and exonerated of any misstep or crime after the ME ruled the death of Babbitt as a homicide. Her death, the grief and grievances of her husband and mother dismissed and met with silence by our legal system and media entities.
Cruel, lopsided justice is what comes to mind.
“When officers are smaller”
There were three other officers with him. The guy was in handcuffs. Floyd was not really a threat at that point. 4 people the size of Chauvin should not have had any problems with Floyd that put them in danger, especially once he was in cuffs.
They had to find him guilty not because of BLM or anyone else but because he was actually guilty. Yes, the police have a tough job sometimes but that doesn’t mean they have carte blanche to do anything. That was clearly depraved indifference on his part. I dont think he meant him to die but he clearly meant for him to suffer and to teach him a lesson, endangering Floyd’s life in the process. It was not just an accident. We cant have police behave this way.
Steve
As I said, steve, it creates a culture.
Dave says big cops, Steve likes them diminutive. Doesn’t matter. Not anymore. Diversity trumps everything.
And, quoting Dirty Harry from the seventies, “How Fashionable!”
I don’t suppose med students have a lot of time for the bar scene, but if you had as much experience there as I, you’d know that it’s always the little guy who picks a fight, the big guy has nothing to prove.
It’s even called little man syndrome.
Call me a pragmatic person but when I contemplate some 2 dozen children killed last year by people of color with no outcry from BLM, my first question is “why†are these lives less important than the life of a druggy career criminal caught in another illegal act? Why are people not disavowing the senseless death – a 7 year old child recently riddled by bullets at a McDonalds drive-through – by presumably another black? Everyday, there are acts of black-on-black violence quietly taking place, lives being disrupted or lost, with no pushback by the sanctimonious members of the BLM movement. And, yet cities are threatened to be burned down, stores looted if one policemen does not receive the verdict thugs and people self identifying as BLM demand.
They said the windows were tinted, the killer certainly had too much character to kill a child deliberately.
Similar accidental shooting on a beautiful summer day here last summer:
https://www.1011now.com/2020/07/23/lpd-investigating-reported-shooting-on-city-bus/