Someone in the press leaked the body cam video of the George Floyd arrest. Taking nothing away from the tragedy or the anger that went along with it – “knee on the throat” isn’t a good look – but seeing this, I’m thinking Keith Ellison would need Vasily Ulrikh on the bench to get a Murder conviction.
I have little to add, except that this piece from two months ago is looking better and better.
Oh, yeah – strap in. Officer Chauvin will be acquitted of “Unintentional Second Degree Murder”, and the other three will get away with lesser included charges. It’s going to make the last week in May look like a kindergarten full of kids who broke into the Koolaid.
Is this trial expected to take place before or after the election?
That Vasily Ulrikh bit was both amusing and educational. Much appreciated in both regards.
Oh joy, more riots and civil unrest after the trial. mJust what the city needs.
The bodycam footage and the toxicology reports showing the levels of Fentanyl and methamphetamine in Floyd’s blood. Oh yeah. He said “I can’t breathe” several times before officers placed him on the ground. Had nothing to do with the knee on his neck. It was his impending death from cardiovascular disease with drug abuse. Get ready for more riots.
I read somewhere that bodycam footage was shown to the public but was not allowed to be filmed, etc, etc… and that is where it leaked from. Did any of you get the memo that there was a pubic viewing?
JPA, IIRC, the media were allowed to watch the videos on laptops provided in a controlled room, and could share transcripts from the videos, but were told the videos were not to be copied or transmitted. It appears the “leaked” videos were recorded on someone’s phone or other device from the laptop screen, rather than downloaded.
Some have speculated that this helps Ellison, or that he was behind the leak, but I don’t see how this does anything but hurt his prosecution. Aside from impacting the potential jury pool, the videos appear to bolster those who say the officers’ actions don’t rise to the statute for 2nd degree murder.
A truly cynical person might say that Ellison never intended for the officers to be convicted; that his plan is for acquittal and the subsequent unrest in the furtherance of his “real” agenda. I’m not that cynical yet but there are things that make me go, “Hmmm”. If that actually is the case, Ellison should reflect on how well that turned out for Robespierre.
“I wanted justice for Floyd, which is why I upped the charge to Murder 2. But those damned White supremacist racists on the jury believed their lying eyes and let the killer cops go free. I guess there’s nothing left to do but burn it all down.”
– Keith Ellison, Star Tribune, sometime next June
the media were allowed to watch the videos on laptops provided in a controlled room, and could share transcripts from the videos
Are you effing kidding me? How is this not tampering with the jury pool when you use complicit and compliant sources that fanned the flames to begin with? Do we know that the entire footage was shown or just selective one? Holy crap! How can this not impact the actual court case?
JD, am I reading too much into this, or is there legal ramifications for selective leaking? Thanks.
jpa, I don’t practice criminal defense anymore (for about two decades now), so I’m not up on the case-law. Frankly, I doubt a district court judge will make any pre-trial which would make the state’s case harder, because that automatically leads to an appeal and being reversed by the Court of Appeals is embarrasing. Safer to let the state make it’s case and hope the jury does the right thing.
My take comes from carry permit training; the use of force stops when the threat stops. In that light, it really doesn’t matter what he’d been doing before he was cuffed for a simple reason; he was cuffed and wasn’t a threat to anyone.
Take #2; since the hyoid or whatever bone wasn’t broken, that’s a limited amount of force that doesn’t appear to have actually killed Floyd. So murder 2 is a huge overcharge, and in a just world, the court will slap Ellison’s minions into next week. Chauvin’s crime is really that he wasn’t in a position to watch for signs of respiratory distress that the apprehended had been mouthing for several minutes, I dare say, and that was because he was “restraining” a person who didn’t need to be restrained and was likely missing his chance to administer a dose of Narcan and save his life.