Bob Dylan hasn’t done an interminable, droning, song about him and he’s the wrong colour to be played by Samuel L Jackson, but will history show Derek Chauvin to be the most wrongly convicted man in America since boxer Rubin Carter? It took nearly 20 years and multiple court actions to overturn Carter’s conviction. In the topsy-turvy racial politics of 21st century America, a white police officer in a Democrat-run city has about the same hope of getting justice done any time soon.
He and his supporters are not giving up, though. Even though the US Supreme Court rejected an appeal, Chauvin has had at least one court win against a racist establishment.
A judge has granted permission to lawyers for Derek Chauvin to have samples from George Floyd examined as part of the former Minneapolis police officer’s efforts to challenge his conviction on a federal civil rights charge stemming from Floyd’s death in 2020.
US District Judge Paul Magnuson agreed in an order Monday to let the defense examine Floyd’s heart tissue and fluid samples to test a theory that Floyd died of a heart condition aggravated by a rare tumor, not – as prosecutors contend – from asphyxiation caused by the white officer pressing his knee on the Black man’s neck for 9 1/2 minutes despite Floyd’s dying cries of, “I can’t breathe.”
Either that, or the three-times-fatal overdose of fentanyl, after the black career criminal gobbled his stash in a panic, when he was pulled up after yet another of his long string of crimes.
But in the racially charged atmosphere of 2021, Chauvin had about as much chance of a fair trial as Emmett Till had of compassion from Mississippi Klansmen in 1955. Racist Democrat demagogues and violent militias like BLM and Antifa made sure of that, besieging the court house and even directly threatening jurors and their families. All that changed from the sort of racist injustice portrayed in To Kill a Mockingbird are the colours of the defendant and of the masks worn by the lynch-mobs.
Chauvin was convicted in state court on murder charges in 2021 and pleaded guilty later that year in federal court to violating Floyd’s civil rights. His federal defender for his appeal attempt, Robert Meyers, argued in his request that Chauvin’s original attorney, Eric Nelson, failed to inform his client that an outside pathologist not directly involved in the case, Dr William Schaetzel, of Topeka, Kansas, had contacted Nelson before Chauvin entered his plea and offered an unsolicited theory that Chauvin did not cause Floyd’s death.
Chauvin claims that amounted to “ineffective assistance counsel” and is seeking a new trial, saying he would not have pleaded guilty if he had known about the pathologist.
Like the perjured ‘eyewitness’ statements that damned Rubin Carter to decades in prison, another key piece of evidence against Chauvin is falling apart in a separate case. Chauvin’s boss at the time is suing the producers of film and book, who accused her of lying in her testimony.
Fourteen current and former Minneapolis police officers have signed sworn declarations saying that they believe Assistant Chief Katie Blackwell perjured herself during Derek Chauvin’s murder trial. According to these officers, the restraint Chauvin used was part of something called the “maximal restraint technique,” or MRT, and was part of MPD officer training, which contradicts Blackwell’s testimony […]
This week, lawyers for Alpha News filed a 113-page motion to have the case dismissed with prejudice […]
According to the motion, these officers “swore that this training was well known – indeed, common knowledge – and omnipresent.”
In other words, Chauvin did nothing more than he was trained to do. And something which even his accuser apparently resorted to at least once.
One of the officers who signed the declaration is former MPD officer Ken Tidgwell, who even produced an image of Blackwell appearing to use a knee-to-neck/upper shoulder restraint during an arrest in 2014.
Still, at this point, Chauvin seems to have about as much chance of getting a fair trial as George Floyd had of usefully contributing to society.
