George Floyd / Chauvin trial starts monday

You are a fine example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Firstly, in your ineffable ignorance you don't grasp that common law legal systems include both statute and case law - as the American system does - and they are not a system of Roman or code law, as many Continental systems are. The legal principles in common law systems are similar in all jurisdictions, regardless of statutory variations.

Secondly, you show you are merely a pompous layman pretending to legal knowledge in your failure to grasp my point about the cause of Floyd's death. The evidence which resulted in the charges against Chauvin show that the police officers' actions were the most likely cause of Floyd's death. The defence can only refute that - or, legally speaking, produce a "reasonable doubt" - if it produces evidence strongly suggestive of death from other causes. It can't. What it is more likely to argue is that Floyd's death was an unintended consequence of Chauvin exercising his law enforcement duty appropriately in the circumstances. But that is a subtle distinction beyond you. But keep breaking wind. That you can do.

Guy is a moron.

Conspiracy is when two or more people plot together to do something - normally illegal. I just talked about one person. either chauvin or a hypothetical person in ITU. Impossible for a conspiracy, since only one person. I am an enginner, i am professionally competant at counting.

No; 'most likely' is not the standard of proof.

No, defence does not have a standard of proof 'likely died'.

Please understand 'reasonable doubt' and 'burden of proof'.

Yes, i am very happy that killing a dieing person may be homicide.

2600 bro wrote:

Lol imagine trying to convince someone that the definition of murder or manslaughter is variable among the various states' judicial systems.

Really missing the forest for the trees here bro.

You lost me, bro. What does what you posted have to do with defending this clearly erroneous statement of law - "if Chauvin applying his knee to Floyd's death cannot be ruled out as a cause then he is guilty of homicide" - made by your friend Armstronglives?

I'm not following what different definitions of murder and manslaughter in different states has to do with anything he posted about claiming to be a legal expert on Minnesota law or what I posted. I'd appreciate it if you would explain or elaborate, then I could maybe respond. Because right now, you lost me, bro. I don't know what you are driving at.

Muldoon wrote:

2600 bro wrote:

Lol imagine trying to convince someone that the definition of murder or manslaughter is variable among the various states' judicial systems.

Really missing the forest for the trees here bro.

You lost me, bro. What does what you posted have to do with defending this clearly erroneous statement of law - "if Chauvin applying his knee to Floyd's death cannot be ruled out as a cause then he is guilty of homicide" - made by your friend Armstronglives?

I'm not following what different definitions of murder and manslaughter in different states has to do with anything he posted about claiming to be a legal expert on Minnesota law or what I posted. I'd appreciate it if you would explain or elaborate, then I could maybe respond. Because right now, you lost me, bro. I don't know what you are driving at.

I caught a little of the live stream on this case this morning and they ended dumping a couple of the selected jurors for being honest and saying they heard about the Civil case. They are asking them to avoid all news/social media from now until the actual trial begins on 3/29.

It was interesting that they kept one of the jurors that had heard about the Civil case but said she could put that behind her and not consider it with the criminal trial. She made the comment that the Civil trial was settled without looking at all the facts, so she didn't have a problem staying on as a juror!

Armstronglivs wrote:

The only way Chauvin could get off is if Floyd had a heart attack prior to that act. He didn't. He begged for his life till he died. I would call that murder.

The official cause of death is cardiopulmonary arrest, not suffocation in the autopsy report [which is somewhat indicative of a heart attack, as a heart will attempt to pump harder when oxygen saturation decreases, which, with his already damaged heart (from chronic drug abuse of fentanyl, meth and cocaine), was a recipe for death]. As possible causative factors it lists the restraint, intoxicants and pre-existing heart conditions. It even notes that absent the video of the restraint, an individual with fentanyl serum levels as high as his arriving to the morgue would be assumed to be an overdose death. That there was no indicator of asphyxiation or damage to the airway takes away the argument that the knee to the neck was the sole cause of death, It is not as clear cut as you make it out to be.

The standard restraint technique with someone who is intoxicated is to put someone on their stomach because it is safer than putting them on their back where they can vomit (intoxicants cause nausea) and suffocate on their own puke. People still die using these restraint techniques in mental institutions and prisons even without people on their back and neck due to pre-existing cardiac conditions and the heavy loads of sedatives in their system that cause respiratory distress. The restraint is just one of many factors that lead to his death. He obviously used fentanyl regularly (due to the metabolite levels), but the active fentanyl in his blood and the chewed pills in the back of the cop car indicate he was trying to ingest the evidence before he could get charged with possession or distribution again (he'd been caught with drugs many, many times in the past).

As far as him pleading for his life, it is hard to take the words of a lying career criminal as an absolute truth. He lied about just losing his mom (she died over two years prior), he lied about his drug use "I'm not on nothin'" (which I guess is the truth since it is a double negative), he complained about not being able to breathe while he was talking and before anyone was on his back (which actually may have been the truth and was more of an indicator he was overdosing and going tachycardic due to a combination of respiratory depression from the kill a horse level of fentanyl in his system, elevated cortisol levels from the stress of being arrested, pre-existing coronary heart disease and panicked breathing), He claims he got shot (no idea where that came from). He claims to be claustrophobic. About the only thing he says that is the truth is that he had COVID.

Claiming to be an expert in another country's law, just because you allege to be a legal expert in some unidentified country that is also founded on common law is a joke. It's like saying a podiatrist saying he's also an expert in cardiology, because he learned about the human body in biology class.

Statutes are not common law. Whoever told you that was lying to you. Black's Law Dictionary defines common law as "The body of law derived from judicial decisions, rather than from statutes or constitutions." First year law students in US law schools are taught the differences between common law and statutory law. You have no clue what you are talking about. And more to the point, you don't know anything about Minnesota law, just because you claim to practice law in a foreign country. That much is evident from the continuous errors you keep posting (see below).

Your deflection lecture regarding the difference between common law and civil law (which you called "code law") is (1) irrelevant and (2) an indication that you are probably a non-practicing academic blowhard.

There isn't a court in the US that would admit you as a legal expert because of your alleged knowledge of another country's common law. It's hard to imagine what kind of presumptuous jackass practicing in, e.g., Malta, would hold themselves out as an expert in American law, just because of the shared common law roots.

As pointed out previously, THIS statement by you - "if Chauvin applying his knee to Floyd's death cannot be ruled out as a cause then he is guilty of homicide" - is a glaring legal error; a misstatement and misapplication of applicable law. If the judge in the Chauvin case issues jury instructions with anything resembling your legal error, he's made the case reversible on appeal. If the prosecution argues anything resembling your legal error to the jury, they get sanctioned, corrected in open court and possibly a mistrial. You've done nothing in your response to defend or even explain your erroneous legal statement.

In fact, incredibly, instead of defending it, you doubled down on your legal errors. This statement by you - "The defence can only refute that - or, legally speaking, produce a "reasonable doubt" - if it produces evidence strongly suggestive of death from other causes" - is yet ANOTHER glaring legal error; a misstatement and misapplication of applicable law. The standard is wrong and the burden is wrong. You are a very confused person. You will NEVER see anything like either of the two legal errors (or the other errors in your other posts, that others point out to you ) that you have posted in a jury instruction in a criminal case anywhere in the U.S.

I love when posters compliment themselves.

Possible Juror; i used to live in the area where gf was shot. when there were shootings after the police used to ride around antagonising people.

D; do you believe the jury system is fair;?

PJ; it depends on your colour. if you are black - we get the things where you need to go to jail, we go to jail. I have white friends, they just get a slap on the wrist. The system is discriminatory against people of colour.

D; maybe this is a good time to fund the defense department for equal rights.

I think the above is an appalling damnation of the perception of justice in US. It saddens me greatly to hear this, and is why this trial is so important The defense has not done himself any favours by answering such a serious accusation flippantly.

Judge; witness is excused.

they actually debated it for some time (or pretended to).

Thanks for this factual recitation. Given the epic emotions surrounding the case, it's important to put some basic facts on the table.

It seems that almost anybody who watches the full 8+ minute video, knowing none of the context, finds it nauseating. (I haven't been able to find the full video, but I've watched extended excerpts.) It was this visceral response that drove last summer's protests. Later, of course, a much longer video showing the full run-up to the knee-on-neck came out, adding contexts and leading some, although not many, to rethink their initial response. The full toxicology report took a while to come out, too.

I'll be honest: the very first time I saw excerpts of the video, I thought that Floyd, downed, early in the encounter, was grandstanding: shouting "I can't breathe" not because he was actually being choked to death, but because he knew that the encounter was being watched and filmed, and because he was deliberately trying to create emotional leverage--and possibly get Chauvin to release him--by playing on the public's memories of Eric Garner. I thought he was being stagey, even calculated. That was my initial response. It's not a response I wanted to have. But it was my first response. (I haven't gone back to check it against the actual video.)

We know now, since the full video of the encounter and its run-up is out there, that Floyd was saying "I can't breathe" long before Chauvin's knee came near to his neck. He was saying it when he was in the back of the cop car, five minutes earlier. Any reasonable person, knowing that, would take it into account when evaluating exactly what was taking place during the 8:43 knee-on-neck sequence.

What most people saw was a handcuffed black man on the ground, no real threat to the four cops surrounding and on top of him, who had the life choked out of him. It's that tableaux--what people were and are 100% sure they saw: calculated, race-based, and entirely needless murder-by-cop due to asphyxiation--that will be difficult for the defense to dislodge, EVEN IF MOST OF IT ISN'T TRUE. The needlessness of what happened, though, is 100% true.

Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, and several other black public intellectuals have questioned whether racism was really operative here. I don't know. In making that case, they invoke Tony Timpa and other whites who have died at the hands of cops. Most of us are familiar with Timpa's name at this point.

Critically important here, I think, are the training that Chauvin received in the use of the neck restraint that he deployed on Floyd. If you're going to hold him criminally liable for Floyd's death, then you need to show that he made one or more grievously bad decisions--actions that were unconscionably out of line with the established protocols in which he'd been instructed. Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd's neck for a while after he stopped struggling. Was that criminal negligence--even if the knee-restraint was justified by policy and properly applied? This is a narrow argument and it won't satisfy many. Certainly many will demand that the ONLY appropriate frame for the entire encounter is a combination of structural racism and individual prejudice (i.e., Chauvin's manifest negative attitudes and behaviors towards black people, if the evidence exists for that.)

Whether or not Chauvin is found guilty, and regardless of what charge he ends up being convicted on (assuming he's convicted), what happened here should, I believe, serve as a wakeup call that there's something very wrong with the way that American policing handled this sort of case. Floyd would almost certainly not be dead if one or more social workers had been quickly deployed to help talk him down from his drug-induced mania and to soften the application of what turned out to be brute force. American cops have a very tough job, but the truth is that there IS a little lack-of-accountability problem, a little too-quick-to-rely-on-violence problem, one that transcends race, and it needs to be addressed in a serious way.

Yes, Floyd was clearly high on fentanyl. Yes, his lungs were two or three times the size the should have been, bloated with liquid. He was in a bad way BEFORE the cops responded. But the way this all played out was straight-up disastrous, in every respect. He didn't need to die. He wouldn't have died if the encounter had been handled differently.

You are clearly obsessed with this story and insist on judging people based on the skin color they were born with. It clouds your ability to think rationally. You go so far as to state that George Floyd was not dying until he was being restrained on the ground while being non-compliant. This is demonstrably false.

The medical examiner stated George Floyd was dying before officers were summoned to the scene of the crime he had committed. Floyd had attempted to hide evidence by injecting pills that mixed with other drugs he had taken, combined with his bad heart, having Covid-19, and high blood pressure. Floyd was going to die on that day regardless of whether a police officer restrained him. Floyd was foaming at the mouth because of the drugs he ingested. After officers placed him into the police vehicle, Floyd became agitated and had to be removed. They discovered particles of the pills he had swallowed on the back seat where he had spit out some of the foam in his mouth.

I am a former police officer. I once rolled up on a routine traffic stop being performed by a fellow officer of a violent convicted felon. Two other officers arrived to assist as well. We all stood beside the stopped vehicle while the initiating officer prepared to give the driver a traffic ticket. While doing so, he saw a baggie of pills lying next to the driver. The driver suddenly grabbed the bag and began swallowing the pills as the officer opened the drivers door and attempted to remove the man. In seconds, a fight broke out between four police officers and one incredibly muscular ex-convict. After maybe 20 seconds, we found ourselves pressed against the front of the car, pinning the suspect against the hood. Somehow, he had gotten possession of an officers wooden night stick and he had it in his right hand which all of us were attempting to keep him from swinging and injuring one of us. I was attempting to place a bar hammer lock on the suspect. It is similar to a choke hold and is meant to cut off circulation and get the suspect to pass out. I shouted to the suspect to release the night stick. He eventually did and we were able to get him into handcuffs.

A minus later we gathered our thoughts and our breath and gave thanks that none of us had a cracked skull. As I realized my slacks were torn through the crotch, one officer asked who was going to write the original report and what time the rest of us should use on their supplementary reports. I looked at my wristwatch to get the current time and it was not on my wrist. Instead, my wrist was bleeding and I had bite marks on it. The suspect was yet to be placed into the arresting officers patrol car and suddenly he coughed up my watch. It was covered in saliva and small pieces of the pills he swallowed. We admitted my watch and the pieces of pills into the property room as evidence. In court, the suspects court appointed attorney claimed he could not be guilty of resisting arrest or assault because he was out-numbered. The judge agreed and fined him $75.

We were seconds away from having broken bones or a skull fracture during the melee and the judge felt the man posed little or no threat.

You are someone who trolls the internet in order to declare those you hate as racists, all while excusing the behavior of criminals. You were probably online for months after Trayvon Martin was killed, defending him. You probably defended Michael Brown, and many others who were non-compliant with police and posed a threat to their safety.

George Floyd is dead and it is because George Floyd was a very unhealthy man who used deadly drugs despite having a bad heart. He was a predator and a monster who pointed a loved gun at the belly of a pregnant woman. He was going to die on that day whether it was while lying in the street or lying on a nearby sidewalk or in the car he was driving. The restraint hold that never blocked his airway had little to do with his death. I'm not saying the jury will make that conclusion. The O.J. Simpson jury decided to ignore all the evidence and acquit O.J. because jury nullification has become an effective tool to free criminals from prosecution.

In a week or maybe a month, you will move on to find yourself another incident to use to smear all police officers and declare them all racists. It is your calling. You have a strong desire to spread your hatred on social media.

2600 bro wrote:

Until we fix policing we will keep paying out everyone's money in giant settlements because we give cops limitless power.

Before police reforms there need to be legal reforms.

1. Timing of Miranda "rights" = what a huge joke.

2. Police legally able to lie to you, but you can't lie to them.

3. Search warrants without/prior to you presenting your case to the judge signing off on said search warrant.

4. Expanding an investigation beyond the scope of the original stop = using the original stop as pretext for a full blown investigation.

Feel free to add your wish list of legal reforms.

Police do not have limitless power. That is absurd. I worked as one and saw several fired for not following procedures. In 2019 there were 10,000,000 arrests made some of the 700,000 police officers and sheriff deputies in the U.S. I believe the FBI stats showed approx. 24 of them resulted in the shooting deaths of unarmed suspects. All were thoroughly investigated and one resulted in criminal charges against the officer. He was tried and convicted and sentenced to prison.

What is it, exactly, that needs fixing when 10 million arrests were made in a year and one resulted in excessive use of force?

Non-compliance with lawful police commands is the problem. Knowing what can result when you fail to do as you are told by police in heightened circumstances should keep people from putting their lives and the lives of officers at risk. But it doesn't. Some people are incapable of self-preservation. We should not celebrate them and treat them as victims.

This is a good post. I do, however, question this phrase from you:

"Floyd would almost certainly not be dead if one or more social workers had been quickly deployed to help talk him down from his drug-induced mania and to soften the application of what turned out to be brute force."

Why do you believe this and what is the basis for it?

surveysays wrote:

I love when posters compliment themselves.

Nice try! I wish I was half as intelligent as Muldoon.

It's nice that there still are some rational posters left at this site and haven't been driven away by constant racist and negative comments by posters like Armstronglivs!

Well stated!! I would love to see a much, much larger fine for resisting arrest!

StevePrefonDead wrote:

This is a good post. I do, however, question this phrase from you:

"Floyd would almost certainly not be dead if one or more social workers had been quickly deployed to help talk him down from his drug-induced mania and to soften the application of what turned out to be brute force."

Why do you believe this and what is the basis for it?

well spotted. in all the tl:dr, what possessed him to write this?

If social workers do have such superhuman powers as the defund the police lobby claim, then the only one i am aware of is avoiding the sort of situation where they actually have to confront (talk nicely, offer an ice cream etc) a remotely dangerous or threatening person - unlike the police.

Armstronglivs wrote:

All the prosecution has to prove is that death most likely ensued from Chauvin's knee on Floyd's neck. Not difficult.

What is much more difficult is for the defence to show that Floyd likely died from an overdose - and not that the drugs would have probably killed him at some later point.

Again, you don't get it. The defendant is INNOCENT until the prosecution can prove beyond a REASONABLE DOUBT that he is guilty. The defense does not need to prove anything.

Proving the "death most likely ensued from Chauvin's knee" means absolutely nothing in a criminal case. It must be beyond a reasonable doubt. In a civil case, which I guarantee will occur if he is found not guilty in criminal court, only requires a "preponderance of evidence." In other words, if a juror in a civil case feels he is 50.1% sure the defendant is guilty, he can convict him. This is NOT the case in a criminal court. See the OJ Simpson murder verdict (not guilty in criminal court) versus the OJ Simpson wrongful death case (liable for $33.5 million in a civil court).

We may have found another juror?!?!

let me, a layman and professional engineer, try to explain 'more likely', 'most likely' and 'reasonable doubt' to this claimed lawyer, armstronglivs. In terms of basic statistics, which is part of my professional competence.

Lets take a pack of playing cards, no jokers (no pun intended). The outcomes we are examining are;

1) Aces (1 of spades hearts, diamonds clubs)

2) Court card (jack queen king, spades hearts diamonds clubs).

3) Ordinary (2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs).

Pick a card.

The least likely outcome (of those considered) is an ace.

The more likely outcome is a court card.

The most likely outcome is an ordinary card.

But any time you draw a card, there is much more than a reasonable doubt that the card will be an ordinary card, despite it being most likely of the outcomes being considered.

Gottit?