Derek Chauvin will likely appeal his guilty verdict in George Floyd's murder. But the odds aren't good.MINNEAPOLIS — Now that fired police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted on all three counts against him, he can still file an appeal. But the odds are not good, considering some 90% of appeals are denied across the United States.
An appeal in the case is a virtual certainty. But what issues Chauvin's lawyers raise to the appellate court are an open question, according to criminal defense experts.
The range in appeal possibilities could run from the possible bias of jurors, the refusal by Judge Peter Cahill to move the trial or sequester the jury or what some experts are saying were questionable jury instructions on some of the charges Chauvin is now guilty of.
Chauvin could also argue ineffective assistance of counsel — a last option, in experts' opinions, but one that could rise because lead defense attorney Eric Nelson did not often object to emotional witness testimony.
But while nearly every conviction yields an appeal, their success rate is about 10% or lower. This could be further hindered by the fact that in Minnesota, the appellate court is filled with elected officials, who would be tasked with potentially overturning one of the most high-profile murder cases in American history.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021...308414002/
An alternate juror at the trial of Derek Chauvin said she agreed with the jury's decision to convict him in George Floyd's death, saying she saw Chauvin as the leader of officers at the scene.
Christensen was one of two alternates dismissed by Judge Peter Cahill after Monday's closing arguments. The remaining 12 jurors voted unanimously Tuesday to convict Chauvin on all counts: second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The identities of jurors and alternates are protected under the judge's order, and Christensen is the first to publicly speak out.
Chauvin, 45, was by far the most senior officer at the scene. Prosecutors said he pinned Floyd to the pavement outside Cup Foods, where Floyd had been accused of passing a counterfeit $20 bill, for 9 minutes, 29 seconds. Three other officers, since fired, face trial in August.
"I felt like he was the leader, and the other officers were following his lead," Christensen said. "I kind of felt like he wasn't taking the warnings seriously obviously, kind of like, 'I know what I'm doing.'"
Christensen described her impressions of Chauvin.
"Every time I would look up, he was right in my vision," she said. "So we locked eyes quite a few times and I was pretty uncomfortable."
Prosecutors played a wide range of videos for the jury, including teenager Darnella Frazier's bystander video that was seen worldwide in the hours after Floyd's death. That video and the officers' body camera video captured bystanders shouting at Chauvin and the other officers to get off Floyd, warning that they were cutting off his breathing and asking them to check for a pulse.
Christensen said she felt prosecutors "made a really good, strong argument" and credited Dr. Martin Tobin, one of their medical experts, for his testimony on how Floyd's breathing was cut off by the restraint.
"Dr. Tobin was the one that really did it for me. He explained everything to me, I understood it, down to where he said, 'This was the moment where he lost his life.' Really got to me."
Christensen was critical of the defense, saying attorney Eric Nelson " overpromised in the beginning and didn't live up to what he said he was going to do."
Nelson argued that Floyd died due to his use of drugs and to heart issues. He also argued that videos were deceptive, that Chauvin's knee wasn't on Floyd's neck as long as prosecutors said and that an autopsy found no evidence of damage to his neck. And he sought to portray the concerned bystanders as a threatening crowd that distracted officers.
Nelson has not commented since the verdicts and didn't immediately respond to a message Thursday.
Christensen praised Frazier for shooting the video, saying without it she didn't think the case would have been possible.
"I just don't understand how it got from a counterfeit $20 bill to a death," she said. "It kind of shocks me."
___https://www.startribune.com/he-was-guilty-extra-juror-in-favor-of-chauvin-conviction/600048853/
Chauvin's alleged accomplices now face their own reckonings in Floyd's murder
"I would think the other three defendants would be highly motivated to reach a plea agreement," former Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner said. "To find a jury in August, after all that's gone on, that could really be fair to these three defendants seems like a very tough task."
No one expects the state to dismiss the cases against the three, but criminal defense attorney Mike Brandt said the state "may make the calculus: Do we want to go through this all again or do we want to make a deal?"
But there's the real question of whether a deal could be reached that would be acceptable to the defendants and the state. The three remaining defendants were all in different positions as the incident unfolded and led to Floyd dying on the ground.
Kueng and Lane, both rookies in their first week, were the first to arrive at Cup Foods after receiving a call of an alleged counterfeit $20 bill used to buy cigarettes. Lane approached and drew his gun on Floyd as Floyd sat behind the wheel of a parked Mercedes SUV. After Floyd was handcuffed, Kueng led him across the street and sat Floyd on the ground, leaning against the wall of a building.
National Urban League president Marc Morial, who was in town for the Chauvin verdict, said the prosecutions of the other three officers may not get as much attention as Chauvin's but are critical because they were "complicit in this nine-minute crucifixion and torture in the streets."
Their role in Floyd's death "strikes directly at the heart of the problem with policing in America," Morial said in an interview. "A message has to be sent that it's OK for an officer witnessing an act of police brutality to intervene to protect a citizen."
Mitchell Hamline School of Law professor Ted Sampsell-Jones said Chauvin's conviction should give prosecutors confidence that a conviction of the other three is possible.
"But given their more limited role in the killing, obtaining a conviction against the other three will be more difficult," he said. "The other three officers will try to lay the blame solely with Chauvin, and those arguments will be more plausible than Chauvin's defense was at his trial."
Criminal defense lawyer Joe Tamburino said Lane has the best defense. During Chauvin's trial, Lane was heard twice on police body-worn cameras asking Chauvin if they should roll Floyd to his side so he could breathe. Both times Chauvin rejected the move.
Sampsell-Jones said the "video evidence isn't as clear or as damning" to the other three as it was to Chauvin.
Overall, Tamburino said the three "are in a much better position to defend their actions" than Chauvin was.
Tamburino said he expects a series of defense motions, including an attempt to delay the trial because it's now scheduled to come fresh on the heels of Chauvin's sentencing sometime this summer.
Tamburino said he also expects the defense attorneys to file motions to limit some of the evidence and testimony seen in the first trial, including that from eyewitnesses, experts and the video from body-worn police cameras.
Morial said a plea bargain with tangible consequences for the officers could be acceptable, but he said a message has to be sent to police officers that, "I better stand up or I could be culpable, too."
Little, 17 years old Darnella Frazier...Forever in the history books.
- Justice for George. "George Floyd, we did it." Those were the words yesterday of Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old who filmed former police officer Derek Chauvin pressing his knee into Floyd's neck for nearly 10 minutes almost a year ago (she wrote them on Facebook, per CNN's Omar Jimenez). Chauvin yesterday was convicted of Floyd's murder, found guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
Without Frazier, that conviction—the first time a white police officer has been convicted of killing a Black man in the state of Minnesota, according to the ACLU—may never have arrived. Her video started a global movement. Its power is even more obvious when viewed alongside the statement Minnesota police first releasedabout a "man [dying] after medical incident during police interaction." Before Frazier's video showed the world what happened, the official version of events was that a "suspect" "physically resisted officers" and "suffer[ed] medical distress."
As much as Frazier has now changed the world, she bears a burden no teenage girl should have to. When she testified in Chauvin's trial in March, Frazier recounted how she was traumatized by the experience; she encountered police's detention of Floyd as she took her 9-year-old cousin to buy snacks. "I’ve stayed up nights apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically interacting and not saving his life. But it’s not what I should have done," Frazier said on the stand in March. “It’s what [Chauvin] should have done." (There's a GoFundMe to support her.) In her Facebook post yesterday, Frazier said she "cried so hard" as her "heart was beating so fast" in the hour before the verdict was announced.
Lawmakers, activists, and Floyd's family members thanked Frazier for bearing witness to Chauvin's murder of Floyd as they addressed the nation yesterday. President Joe Biden, in his remarks, referenced "a brave young woman with a smartphone camera."
Vice President Kamala Harris focused her speech on the core issue: systemic racism. "Here's the truth about racial injustice: It is not just a Black America problem. Or a people of color problem," she said, speaking before Biden took the podium. "It is a problem for every American. It is keeping us from fulfilling the promise of liberty and justice for all."
The Floyd family is clear: Floyd should be alive, and that would be better justice than a guilty verdict. And yet, after speaking with the Floyd family yesterday, Biden referenced what the family has shared on behalf of Floyd's 7-year-old daughter, Gianna: Daddy changed the world. "Let that be his legacy," Biden said.
It's Floyd's legacy—and in a different way, it's Darnella Frazier's.
https://fortune.com/2021/04/21/darnella-...y-verdict/
Another case against Chauvin
https://abcnews.go.com/US/chauvins-convi...d=77254006
Late last year, as a team of Minnesota state prosecutors was preparing for the trial that would ultimately convict former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd, they received a series of videos depicting Chauvin's handling of another case three years earlier that by their own description shocked them.
The videos, from Sept. 4, 2017, allegedly showed Chauvin striking a Black teenager in the head so hard that the boy needed stitches, then allegedly holding the boy down with his knee for nearly 17 minutes, and allegedly ignoring complaints from the boy that he couldn't breathe.
Feds plan to indict Chauvin, other three ex-officers on civil rights charges
Leading up to Derek Chauvin's murder trial, Justice Department officials had spent months gathering evidence to indict the ex-Minneapolis police officer on federal police brutality charges, but they feared the publicity frenzy could disrupt the state's case.
So they came up with a contingency plan: If Chauvin were found not guilty on all counts or the case ended in a mistrial, they would arrest him at the courthouse, according to sources familiar with the planning discussions.
The backup plan would not be necessary. On April 20, the jury found Chauvin guilty on all three murder and manslaughter counts, sending him to the state's most secure lockdown facility to await sentencing, and avoiding the riots many feared could engulf the city once again.
Now, with Chauvin's state trial out of the way, federal prosecutors are moving forward with their case. They plan to ask a grand jury to indict Chauvin and the other three ex-officers involved in George Floyd's killing — J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao — on charges of civil rights violations, a source said.
If the grand jury votes to indict, the former officers will face the new civil rights charges on top of the state's cases, meaning all four could be headed toward yet another criminal trial in federal court.
The backup arrest strategy and meticulous planning over the timing of charges illustrates the complicated synchronicity of two parallel investigations into the most high-profile case of police brutality in decades. Over the better part of the last year, as special prosecutor Keith Ellison's team pursued murder and manslaughter charges, federal authorities have been mounting their own case in private before a grand jury — a group of 23 citizens who meet in secret to hear evidence and ultimately decide if there is probable cause to charge.
Under the contingency arrest plan, the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office would have charged Chauvin by criminal complaint — a quicker alternative for a federal charge that doesn't require a grand jury — so they could arrest him immediately, and then asked a grand jury for an indictment, according to sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Prosecutors want to indict Chauvin in connection to two cases: For pinning Floyd down by his neck for more than nine and a half minutes in May 2020, and for the violent arrest of a 14-year-old boy in 2017. In the latter case, Chauvin struck the teen on the head with his flashlight, then grabbed him by the throat and hit him again, according to court documents.
The other three ex-officers would be charged only in connection to Floyd's death.
The federal case will be prosecuted by Justice Department attorneys in Minnesota and Washington, D.C.
The charges would run in addition to the Justice Department's investigation into whether Minneapolis police engage in a pattern and practice of unlawful behavior. Justice officials announced this investigation the day after Chauvin's guilty verdict, another calculated move designed to avoid interfering with the state's trial.
https://www.startribune.com/feds-plan-to...600051374/
The second arrest that has been the subject of the federal investigation is lesser known. It was captured on body-camera footage, which prosecutors for the state's case described in court documents, citing it as evidence of Chauvin's brand of violent policing when dealing with suspects refuse to bend to his will. The video has not been publicly released, but it is described in court records.On Sept. 4, 2017, Chauvin and another officer responded to a domestic assault, in which a mother said her juvenile son and daughter assaulted her. The officers arrived to find the 14-year-old son lying on the floor in the back of the house, on his phone, and ordered him to get up because he was under arrest.
When the boy refused to comply, Chauvin grabbed him and wordlessly struck the teen in the head with his flashlight multiple times. The video shows Chauvin using a neck restraint, choking the boy unconscious, then placing him in a prone position with a knee in his back for about 17 minutes until paramedics arrived, according to court documents.
In a scene reminiscent of the Floyd rest, Chauvin held the position even after the child told him that he was in pain and couldn't breathe, and after the mother tried to intervene, prosecutors said. At one point, the boy started bleeding from his ear — from getting hit with the flashlight, he later told paramedics — and he asked to be flipped on his back. He then began crying and again asked to be flipped over, prompting Chauvin to ask if the boy would be "flopping around at all."
"No," the boy responded.
"Better not," Chauvin said. He kept his knee on the child's back. According to prosecutors, Chauvin's report from the incident suggested that the boy "then displayed active resistance to efforts to take him into custody" by "flailing his arms around." He went on to write that the boy, whom he described as "approximately 6'2" and at least 240 pounds," would "escalate his efforts to not be arrested," and because of the boy's large size, Chauvin "deliver[ed] a few strikes to [the juvenile male] to impact his shoulders and hopefully allow control to be obtained."
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