On Monday, the US Supreme Court rejected former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s appeal to reconsider his conviction for second-degree murder in the killing of George Floyd.
The justices did not comment on their decision to leave in place state court rulings affirming Chauvin’s conviction and 22 1/2-year sentence, San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
In October, attorneys representing Chauvin appealed to the Supreme Court to review his case. This appeal was based on the refusal of a Minnesota trial court to change the venue of the trial and sequester the jury. Chauvin argued that holding the trial in Minneapolis violated his right to a fair trial. He argued this was due to extensive pretrial media coverage and the potential for violent protests and riots if he were found not guilty.
“Mr. Chauvin’s case shows the profound difficulties trial courts have to ensure a criminal defendant’s right to an impartial jury consistently when extreme cases arise,” his attorneys told the court, per USA Today. “This was particularly true here when the jurors themselves had a vested interest in finding Mr. Chauvin guilty in order to avoid further rioting in the community in which they lived and the possible threat of physical harm to them or their families.”
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a Black man, died while in police custody. Video footage showed Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes. This led to widespread protests across the United States under the “Black Lives Matter” banner, advocating against police brutality.
As a result, Chauvin was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter.
Tucker Carlson addressed an issue that has been the subject of intense scrutiny and debate for more than three years: the circumstances surrounding the death of George Floyd. Carlson broke through the obfuscating cloud of mainstream media and challenged the narrative that George Floyd was murdered by a ‘racist’ white cop, Derek Chauvin.
During his recent show, Tucker Carlson revealed new court case information coming from Hennepin County, Minnesota. Although not directly related to Floyd or Chauvin, the case involves a deposition from Amy Sweasy, a prosecutor in the area.
Amy Sweasy, a top prosecutor in Hennepin County, filed a lawsuit against her former boss, Mike Freeman, alleging sex discrimination and retaliation. As a part of this legal endeavor, a treasure trove of documents and testimonies has come to light, providing an unfiltered view into the internal workings and pressures that shaped the high-profile case against Chauvin and his fellow officers. The state settled the sex discrimination claim, agreeing to pay $190,000 to Sweasy, who resigned in April 2021.
Patrick Lofton, Senior Assistant County Attorney who worked on police use-of-force cases with Sweasy, explicitly detailed the pressure prosecutors were under to file charges. “The city was burning down,” he stated, underlining the urgency of the moment, Alpha News reported.
Although Lofton expressed that he believed there was “probable cause to charge Mr. Chauvin with third-degree murder,” he felt that the external pressure was “insane.” Lofton, along with Sweasy, withdrew from the officers’ cases in June 2020, capturing his reservations in a letter to Freeman: “I wanted it in writing, and I wanted to make sure it was documented that I wasn’t going to let that situation, what was going on in the world, affect my judgment because I have to sleep at night no matter what.”
Among the documents and testimonies, Sweasy discussed a crucial conversation she had with Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker the day after Floyd’s death.
Dr. Baker reportedly said that there were “no medical findings that showed any injury to the vital structures of Mr. Floyd’s neck. There were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation.”
“In other words, George Floyd, according to the official autopsy, was not murdered. He died instead of what we used to call natural causes, which in his case would include decades of drug use, as well as the fatal concentration of fentanyl that was in his system on his final day. So this was not a killing, it was yet another narcotics OD in a country that records more than 100,000 of them every year. The medical examiner clearly understood that and, in fact, articulated it,” Tucker Carlson said.
With this new development, Police officer Derek Chauvin filed papers in court last week, saying that the evidence proves that he did not commit murder in Floyd’s death, the Associated Press reported.
In his filing, the former cop said he would never have agreed to plead guilty if he had known about the theories of a Kansas pathologist who says that Floyd’s physical condition was the principal cause of death, not the actions of the police.
Chauvin is asking the judge to throw out his conviction and order a new trial, or at the very least open a new evidentiary hearing to look at the evidence.
The convicted Chauvin pleaded guilty to charges after a video showed him placing his knee on George Floyd’s neck during an arrest attempt on May 25, 2020. In the video, Floyd is heard saying “I can’t breathe,” before passing out. The man’s death sparked dangerous and costly riots nationwide and spurred the growth of the anti-cop “Defund the Police” movement.
Chauvin said that Topeka, Kansas, Dr. William Schaetzel has reviewed the autopsy records and feels that Floyd did not die of asphyxia caused by the cop’s knee cutting off his air flow, but instead died of a rare tumor called a paraganglioma, which can cause a fatal surge of adrenaline.
Schaetzel told The Associated Press that he felt his diagnosis was serious enough to alert authorities and Chauvin.
“I can’t go to my grave with what I know,” Schaetzel said. “I just want the truth,” he added.
Schaetzel also said he tried to alert officials during Chauvin’s trial in 2021, as well. He said he spoke to trial attorney Eric Nelson as well as Judge Peter Cahill, but nothing came of the attempt.
Chauvin claimed that Nelson was negligent for neglecting to tell him of Schaetzel’s claims. The convicted cop also said that Nelson failed to challenge the constitutionality of the federal charge.
The jailed cop also said that no jury would have convicted him if they had heard Schaetzel’s evidence.
Chauvin filed his motion without a lawyer.
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