surfsup
Lemonjam
LemonJam
surfsup
Lemonjam
No Hate Crime Conviction: Minnesota prosecutors, including Attorney General Keith Ellison, publicly stated that there was no explicit or overt statement of motive to prove Chauvin committed a hateful crime driven by racial bias
Surfsup- There is clear evidence of Chauvin's repeated pattern of behaviour, ie. his use of excessive force against black men- see some detail in post above.
Of course you believe you know better than the attorney general.
Back to suiting your own bias again.
I don't know better that Attorney General- he is well able to speak for himself. We have him to thank for securing Chauvin's conviction when it looked like Chauvin was going to get away with his actions.
Google “It looked like Chauvin would get away with it: Minnesota’s top attorney on how we won justice for George Floyd’s family”. He has also published a book.
When seeing Derek Chauvin in court for the first time, Keith Ellison references “the banality of evil”, a phrase coined by writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt when covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.
“The point of the whole book is that Nazis were not these big, scary people that your imagination conjures. They’re ordinary, they’re plain, they’re very regular and they’re a lot less than you assume they would be and that’s how I felt about Derek Chauvin. He looked like a relatively small man – I bet he didn’t weigh 140lb. Here’s this guy who acted so monstrously: it’s just a man, not a very big one.”
The prosecution was directed by Ellison, who led every meeting, assigned duties to the team and sat in court every day scribbling observations in old notebooks from his 12-year spell in the House of Representatives. When those were full, a friend at a law firm gave him more.
The notes were invaluable to prosecutors as the trial unfolded and served as raw material for Ellison’s published book, Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence, which offers a blow-by-blow account of the case and spotlights a culture in which the training manual often receives lip service and complaints about “bad cops” are too easily ignored. It asks what role prosecutors, defendants, heads of police unions, judges, activists, legislators, politicians and media figures can play in reforming a criminal justice system that fails people of colour
The book begins when Ellison, attorney general of Minnesota, was woken by his phone at 4.45am by an urgent message. He watched a mobile phone video that showed Floyd, trapped under Chauvin’s knee, shouting “Mamma! Mamma! I’m through!” and, repeatedly, “I can’t breathe!” Ellison could not believe how long the torment continued. Ellison recalls: “Even though I have been working on police accountability and brutality issues for years, I was still shocked. I was still blown away by the inhumanity of what I saw.” The side of every police car in Minneapolis displays the words: “To protect with courage, to serve with compassion.” The first statement from the city police department about Floyd was entitled Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction and made no mention of officers restraining him on the ground with a knee on his neck.
The state attorney general comments: “I did not expect to see basically a whitewashing of what happened to George Floyd. It said he died of a medical emergency – sounds like a heart attack or a stroke. It does not sound like positional asphyxia with a knee on the neck and so I found that dumbfounding as well.” A murder conviction of a police officer for an on-duty death is uncommon. The officers accused of beating Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991 were acquitted, while Breonna Taylor, Mike Brown and Eric Garner’s cases never made it past the grand jury. “History was on Derek Chauvin’s side,” Ellison says. “It looked a lot more like Chauvin would get away with it than not.”
The jury found Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Ellison felt a rush of relief but took no joy at the sight of a man whose life had changed forever.
On the faces of the Floyd family he saw “validation” and “vindication”, he recalls. More than anything else, their brother was treated like human trash and the verdict said, no, he’s a human being worthy of respect like anyone. To them, it was extremely emotional – tears – and then they were surprisingly calm. They’re a very dignified family, very dignified people. They were clearly relieved: they didn’t know what the jury was going to decide
