A panel of 12 jurors and 2 alternates has been seated for the trial of Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd.
Jury selection was completed Tuesday, March 23, after two weeks of questioning and the dismissal of two previously selected jurors. The court determined the two dismissed jurors could not remain impartial after the city of Minneapolis announced its record-setting $27M civil settlement with the family of George Floyd.
I wonder how anonymous they’ll remain.
On Sunday, 20-year-old Daunte Wright was killed in a Minneapolis suburb. Following a traffic stop for expired registration, officer Kim Potter shot Wright, apparently intending to tase him, as he fled arrest for an open warrant. (Wright and another man had been charged with first-degree attempted aggravated robbery in December 2019.) Potter has since resigned and been charged with second-degree manslaughter. Coming during the trial of officer Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd, Wright’s death threw fuel on a simmering fire: about 80 people were arrested in the area on Tuesday night for throwing bricks and bottles and inciting riots.
Black Lives Matter ignores victims of systemic racism and enriches a select few, so say the families of those killed by the police and many of the group’s own activists.
Founded in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for his role in Trayvon Martin’s death, the group has held protests around the country against perceived systemic racism against minorities. Black Lives Matter has sparked global conversations on race and policing and is credited with a number of criminal justice reform efforts.
But on Thursday, the mother of Breonna Taylor, a black woman killed by police during a raid in March 2020, charged that the movement in her city of Louisville, Kentucky, is nothing more than a scam.
BREAKING: Chauvin trial judge discloses to defense that the trial could be overturned.
"I will give you that Congresswoman Waters may have given you something in appeals that could result in the whole trial being overturned." pic.twitter.com/p5HZkWzWtG
— MRCTV (@mrctv) April 19, 2021
Black Lives Matter protesters in Minnesota dropped to a knee and set off to march over a fatal police shooting — just to return when they learned it was a white carjacker who had fired at police, according to reports.
Dozens of people protesting outside Governor Tim Walz’s mansion in St. Paul Sunday were filmed by Fox 9 reporter Mitti Hicks as they knelt for a moment of silence over initial rumors about Sunday’s 3 p.m. fatal shooting.
#Burnsville
*profanity warning*
The mental gymnastics here are almost impressive. Listen to what they say. pic.twitter.com/yDBlKXZVwS— Shane B. Murphy (@shanermurph) April 18, 2021
A 7-year-old girl was killed and her father was seriously wounded in a shooting Sunday afternoon as they were getting food at a McDonald’s drive-thru in the Homan Square neighborhood.
The father, Jontae Adams, 28, and his daughter, Jaslyn, were in a silver Infiniti about 4:20 p.m. at the McDonald’s, 3200 W. Roosevelt Road, when they were shot, Chicago police said. A McDonald’s employee, who asked not to be named, said two people got out of a gray car and started shooting at the victim’s car.
… Police said the shooting was believed to be gang-related, and less than three hours later, two people were shot in their car at a Popeyes in Humboldt Park, which investigators believe is connected to the McDonald’s shooting.
The world is focused on three police-related deaths: the killing of George Floyd by former Officer Derek Chauvin; the shooting of Daunte Wright by former Officer Kim Potter; and the shooting of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old in Chicago, by Officer Eric Stillman. There is a fourth death that has not received comparable attention: Police Officer Darian Jarrott was murdered in cold blood by a career criminal, Omar Felix Cueva, whose car the officer stopped and politely asked for identification.
These four cases taken together, demonstrate the considerable disparity among cases involving police-related deaths. Each case presents different facts, different legal considerations, different moral conclusions, and different lessons to be learned. Let us consider them each separately, as they deserve.
Minneapolis looks like a military fortress ahead of the George Floyd murder trial verdict — with fears heightened by a drive-by shooting targeting some of the thousands of National Guard members trying to protect the city.
The Minnesota city had already dramatically increased security ahead of the trial of ex-cop Derek Chauvin — ramping it up even further following the fatal police shooting of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, a Minneapolis suburb just 10 miles from where Floyd was killed.
Legal Insurrection has live coverage of the closing arguments.
The following are some basic facts established during the three-week trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. Both sides have rested their cases, and Chauvin’s defense lawyer, Eric Nelson, is preparing his closing argument for Monday.
George Floyd said many times before he was put on the ground that he couldn’t breathe. It was also established that Chauvin’s knee was not on Floyd’s throat, so that couldn’t have asphyxiated him. Some of the time Chauvin was restraining Floyd, it was established that Chauvin actually had his knee on Floyd’s shoulder blade, where not all of his weight was on Floyd. Rather, he shifted his weight around at times from his knee to his lower leg and foot. Also, it was established that Chauvin’s knee restraint could not have stopped the blood flow in one of Floyd’s carotid arteries, and even if he did, blood would have continued flowing to the brain through the carotid artery on the other side of the neck.
The nation is bracing for a verdict in Derek Chauvin’s trial over the death of George Floyd, as racial tensions are roiled by two other shocking police killings.
Closing arguments in Chauvin’s trial are expected Monday, after which the jury will begin its deliberations. Chauvin, now 45, was a Minneapolis police officer when he was filmed kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes during a May arrest. Floyd was declared dead at a nearby hospital.
Justice has been surrendered to political expedience and the mob so I anticipate a guilty verdict which will or should mitigate the rioting.
Outcome is expected to resonate nationwide, particularly in cities that have seen continuing demonstrations over police violence
Protests against police killings flared across the US this weekend, from Minneapolis to Chicago to Portland, as Americans wait for a verdict in the trial of the white police officer charged with murdering George Floyd last year.
Closing arguments are expected in the Derek Chauvin trial on Monday. The most serious charge the former Minneapolis officer is facing in Floyd’s death is second-degree murder, but the jury might choose to find him guilty on third-degree murder or manslaughter, or acquit him altogether.
California Representative Maxine Waters joined protesters in Minnesota as demonstrations entered a seventh night on Saturday after the death of Daunte Wright.
Waters told the protesters at Brooklyn Center that she will fight for justice on their behalf and urged them to ‘to get more confrontational’ – just one day after protests descended into violence.
‘I am not happy that we have talked about police reform for so long,’ Waters said. ‘We’re looking for a guilty verdict,’ she added in regards to the Derek Chauvin trial. ‘If we don’t, we cannot go away.’
If Trump was removed from Twitter AND Facebook for “inciting violence” then Maxine Waters needs to be federally charged and impeached. https://t.co/FecHvtTweB
— Steven Crowder (@scrowder) April 18, 2021
In an open letter to candidates noting that “the whole world was rocked by the Black Lives Matter movement” in 2020, with society “forced society to hold a mirror up to itself and confront its deep rooted issues with systemic racism and unconscious bias”, the All Black Coalition (ABC) said that candidates vying for the position of London mayor — currently held by Labour’s Sadiq Khan, whose first term was extended by election delays following the onset of the coronavirus pandemic — should implement policies from a “Black Community (UK) Manifesto”.
Last night, as I scrolled through my newsfeed on Facebook, I saw multiple posts referring to the shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo by Chicago police officer Eric Stillman, video (warning: graphic) of which had just been released by the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability.
All the posts linked to news stories with headlines emphasizing one detail: at the moment Toledo was struck by the officer’s gunfire, his hands were raised and appeared to be empty.
Tamika Palmer, the mother of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, said in a Facebook post that the Black Lives Matter organization is a “fraud” that exploited her daughter’s death. Taylor was killed last year when plainclothes police officers executed a no-knock warrant on her Louisville, Kentucky home.
