George Floyd trial,could you make a case for the defendant not being guilty of the charges?

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Seattle, Mar 30, 2021.

  1. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    @ Vociferous - So, why did the jury find him guilty of all charges? Do you think they got the verdict wrong?

    We can’t read Chauvin’s mind as to why he acted as he did that day, but it points to a policing/system problem in that Chauvin likely assumed he would be believed over someone he was arresting. Had it not been for that bystander’s video, he may have been believed. That’s why the Floyd family won a $27 million settlement from the city of Minneapolis; however it happened, the police department is responsible for cops like Chauvin.

    There are many great police officers out there, but police departments need to weed out the ones like Chauvin. Again, it was brought up in trial that he didn’t follow procedure. Unless everyone was lying under oath for the prosecution, that’s pretty convincing evidence that pointed to Chauvin’s guilt.
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2021
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  3. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    Juries vote their feelings, as they don't generally understand the law, no matter how much they're "informed." And prosecutors are good at exploiting those feelings, with an air of authority to boot.

    No, it doesn't. That's your feelings overwhelming your understanding.

    All the video (not just the bystander's) demonstrate why he should have been believed.

    The city deciding to settle has nothing to do with anyone's criminal guilt. That settlement was equal parts virtue signalling and reparations by proxy.

    As predicted, you've continued to ignore everything I've told you and explicitly shown you. No one had to lie to testify with 20/20 hindsight, rather than the actual situation and unknowns at the time.
     
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  5. candy Valued Senior Member

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    Fun fact: Most police cars engage the child proof locks on the rear doors so they can only be opened from the outside. Why would an officier open the opposite side door if the suspect was not contained?
     
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  7. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    As far as already having a unsecured suspect goes, there is zero difference between one door you can't get closed and two doors being open. But after three officers failed to secure him by pushing, you resort to having one pull. Unless you can get both doors shut, child locks had no chance of securing anyone.

    Got anymore completely irrelevant points?
     
  8. candy Valued Senior Member

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    Vociferous you are the one who refuses to believe the videos. You are clinging to the assertion that the victim forced his way out of the vehicle necessitating Chauvin putting his knee on his neck. I note that the WJS footage does not include Chauvin's body cam. Do you wonder why?
     
  9. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    No, I've actually cited the videos, with time codes. Specifically Chauvin's body cam, where you can step through it frame by frame to see that his hands were not on Floyd when he suddenly lunged right into the body cam on Chauvin's chest. Not my problem if you believe Chauvin has telekinesis. Magical thinking is often resorted to in affirming one's own emotionally motivated bias. The suspect repeatedly proved the need for rather extreme restraint and control measures by resisting all orders, being strong enough to keep three officers from being able to put him in a car (where he would have been safely secured), displaying behaviors of drug use well known to make suspects stronger, more unpredictable, and dangerous. Prosecution witnesses testified that people on drugs who appear to be unconscious can suddenly come to and present a danger. It's all there for you to see, if you'd only bother to.
     
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2021
  10. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    OK
    Was the conviction political?
    Will the conviction be overturned during the appeals process?
     
  11. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    Some may say that the conviction was political, while others will disagree. ^^

    Of course, every person who has ever been convicted of murder if they have the financial means, will try to get that conviction overturned. I'm thinking Chauvin would be no exception. If he wins his appeal, he'd have to go through another trial, which I'm not sure how the verdict would change (given the same evidence), but you never know. High profile cases stand a greater chance imo of having a successful appeal, but the odds are still low. Supposedly, successful appeals are usually rare.
     
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2021
  12. candy Valued Senior Member

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    Are you referring to the footage that shows Chauvin's hands around Floyd's neck before it falls off his uniform?
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    No.

    The political pressure was to acquit, as many times before.
     
  14. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    No, it wasn't. This was the same as "many times before".
     
  15. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    I have been on a jury. I made an informed judgment based on all of the evidence in the case.

    Have you ever been on a jury, Vociferous? If so, did you vote with your feelings?
     
  16. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    "wasn't"
     
  17. Capracus Valued Senior Member

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    Comparing the like statements of you and Hannity is hardly an exercise in subjectivity.
    Now you’re catching on, it implies that you mimic other conservatives, like conservative commentator Sean Hannity.
    It’s not a matter of how you think of yourself that defines your ilk, it’s a matter of how you objectively fit into a particular group. You’ve already self identified as a conservative, therefore by your own admission, like it or not, you’er of a conservative ilk.
    When Hannity is guilty of making offensive statements, I condemn him, when you are guilty of making like statements, I will note the similarity and condemn you as well. But who knows, it’s possible that you or Hannity might occasionally say something of redeeming value that deserves praise. Humor me, and say something that doesn’t sound like a typical conservative tool.
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The direction and strength of the political pressure on the judicial system, including the jury, was similar to the point of appearing identical. So was the identity of the perpetrator - he had a long record of citizen abuse and filed complaints.

    The major new circumstance was the existence of cell phone video.

    At least that's what all the local folks
    - the people who have been watching the Minneapolis police force build its current reputation, including by letting that cop off on more than a dozen previous complaints of brutality and mistreatment of black and red citizens during his 18 years of employment and protection by the likes of Bob Kroll -
    thought at the time.
    https://www.insider.com/president-minneapolis-police-union-wore-white-power-patch-lawsuit-2020-5
    The central problem was that the elected and re-elected head of the Minneapolis police officers union was too politically powerful to defy.

    btw: Kroll was still on the job until the city administration realized the implications of the new factor: cell phone video that could not be withheld from the public.
    . So incompetence - the inability of four professional police officers to arrest someone suspected of being flipped out on drugs - is your explanation for their suffocating him for nine minutes, including three minutes in which he appears to be unconscious.

    Are the police in your town likewise incapable of making an arrest in such circumstances? How many white men flipped out on drugs have the police in your town killed by suffocation in broad daylight?
     
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Hannity's feed is not invented by Hannity. Your parroting of the same stuff Hannity parrots, his feed, day by day and word for word sometimes, does not depend on your getting it secondhand from him personally - there is an entire US media population devoting their professional lives to amplifying and repeating and establishing as normal the frame, at least, of the Republican Party's viewpoint and assumed historical context. Every mass market news outlet employs at least a couple of them, and frames all debated or controversial issues accordingly.

    It's also a feature - a standard characteristic of that crowd - that they don't know (or at least claim to not know) from where they're getting their memes and talking points. Apparently they think that matching vocabulary and argument and claimed context day by day and spin by spin - right down to flagrant errors of fact, choice of topic, reversals of claim, specific misuses of specific terms, etc, - is sufficiently explained by saying the word "coincidence" or appealing in some usually vague way to a common reality influence.

    As far as the control and detainment techniques of Minneapolis police officers

    - the ones in good standing with their fellow officers, respected veterans of a police force every black man I have ever talked to in Minnesota agrees resembles a Klan chapter or white biker gang almost as much as it does a law enforcement agency -

    Floyd was not the first large black man plausibly accused of crime by a victim who never made it to jail after being accosted by the Minneapolis police, who after being "subdued" was likely headed for a hospital, but somehow died in handcuffs while being "arrested".
     
  20. Thus Spoke Registered Senior Member

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    Numerous white people have died in similar situations but we never hear about it.

    Prone Restraint

    Police officers have been getting mixed messages about the dangers of prone restraint. Many have been taught that it was a myth, e.g., the studies done by Dr. Christine Hall, Dr. Gary Vike and Dr. Mark Kroll.

    Manslaughter, yes, but not murder.
     
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  21. Capracus Valued Senior Member

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    The charges fit the crime.

    WHAT'S SECOND-DEGREE UNINTENTIONAL MURDER?

    It's also called felony murder. To prove this count, prosecutors had to show that Chauvin killed Floyd while committing or trying to commit a felony — in this case, third-degree assault. They didn't have to prove Chauvin intended to kill Floyd, only that he intended to apply unlawful force that caused bodily harm.


    https://journalnow.com/whats-second...cle_5a95246a-a7d5-59c7-a0d9-5198cddbaea0.html

    2020 Minnesota Statutes

    609.195 MURDER IN THE THIRD DEGREE.
    (a) Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 25 years.

    https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.195
     
    Last edited: Aug 13, 2021
  22. Thus Spoke Registered Senior Member

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    Fentanyl; do you know why they love it? It can break through tolerance levels induced by heroin, oxycodone and methadone, but it’s extremely dangerous because it’s 70X more potent than heroin at inducing respiratory depression.

    Watch Kueng’s bodycam. Was he struggling to breath prior to Chauvin putting his knee on him? Yes, his suffocation alarm was going off before he even touched the ground. Even very small repeated doses of fentanyl can induce a rigidity in the diaphragm, chest wall and upper airway.

    Don’t get me wrong, suffocating while being restrained would be terrifying, but I think the real murderer was sitting next to him in the vehicle.

     
    Last edited: Aug 13, 2021
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  23. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    James, I'm just going to get in the middle of this long enough to remind that you're not an American.

    I have jury duty coming up next month. I don't expect to be seated.

    See, in the U.S., in my county, they bring us into the courtroom in groups, ask us some general questions, and from shows of hands ask prospective jurors particular questions. Attorneys then have two kinds of objections by which they remove jury members. The first kind is called a peremptory challenge; the attorneys can dismissa anyone from the jury pool for any reason they need not state to the court. They have a limited number of these objections. There are also substantive objections that the court must decide on. Sit through the right session, and you'll see it. For instance, one guy literally stood up and told the judge he absolutely refused to give this defendant a fair trial; the judge would not allow him to walk out, and would not accept a substantive objection, forcing the defense to burn a peremptory objection. Meanwhile, the prosecution asked a question about the constitution, and one about civil rights, and used peremptory objection to strike everyone who answered affirmatively. In the U.S., prosecutors generally want juries that vote their feelings; get people mad enough at a defendant, they'll convict.

    One of the things about American juries is the question of priorities; the way to make a jury pay attention is to make the case feel more important than just everyday business of the court. In the legendary gang and drug wars of my lifetime, Black juries in Black communities were among a prosecutor's best friends, because the jury box was one of the only tools Black people had to effect leverage in a bad situation. They did their jobs for their communities. One thing to remember is that for all the shit people gave Hillary Clinton about "superpredators" and the crime bill that even Bernie supported, Black juries did not take the opportunity to protest by simply acquitting Black defendants, but, rather, did their damn jobs because the jury box was one of the only tools they had.

    Now, white supremacists judging Black people? Yes, that would count as an example of a jury attending its feelings. Or think of it this way: If a jury can acquit a sex offense because a woman was so reckless as to wear a swimsuit in Florida during the summer, they're not voting on the facts but, rather, their feelings about women. Consider that in Weld County, Colorado, a prosecutor refused to prosecute a confessed rape, and while the victim's recording of Congressman Buck (R-CO4) does really sound like he's telling her it's her fault, his public excuse was that he did not believe the good people of Weld County would convict this confessed rape. That is, he didn't think a jury would convict for the evidentiary fact of a confession, which says something about Weld County. He might have been right; as his present title suggests, they promoted that prosecutor to Congress. Vociferous is not necessarily wrong that many jurors vote their feelings regardless of the facts, but, no, the Chauvin trial is not that example. If this jury voted according to their feelings, the prevailing emotional current was, ¡Don't screw this up!

    Now, think of my county, where a white judge can look at the Black defendant sitting in front of him, and hear a white juror announce that because his adult son died of a drug overdose he refuses to give the defendant in this bail case a fair hearing, and not see a substantive reason to dismiss this particular juror for cause. As far as feelings are concerned, I cannot imagine the same scene playing out so casually if the whole world happened to be watching.

    And, besides, in most occasions when juries are voting on their feelings, the jurors still actually think they're making an informed judgment based on the evidence. And cases like the Florida rape acquittal feel obscure, in part because, as Ken Buck demonstrated, it's just an inefficient way to achieve the same result. There are much more efficient pathways to particular outcomes. It's how, in my state, you can be shot to death for following police instructions, and it's nobody's fault but your own because police work is inherently scary.

    As to our neighbor's point, he tells us more about himself than anything else. The reason I'm getting in the middle at the moment is to remind you about his habit of confidently asserting things that don't actually make any sense. This is one of those occasions.

    A very interesting hair to split about American jurisprudence is the idea that prosecutors don't bring cases if they aren't certain they can win a conviction. The hair to split comes with observing that winning a conviction is a separate question from the truth of whether someone is really and actually guilty. Vociferous is not wrong that prosecutors are good at exploiting fear and ignorance among jurors. It's why, for instance, the prosecutor in my jury pool peremptorily dismissed everyone who answered two questions about the constitution and civil rights affirmatively.

    But given the conduct of the police department, as well as the other officers involved, the state could have gone with murder one and racketeering. And while there might be a technical case for that, establishing those requires prosecutors overcoming enough of their own prejudice in favor of law enforcement. As it is, the charges they went with were charges they knew they could win.

    Consider the emotional value of Chauvin's defense: The people reminding police of their duty and pleading for George Floyd's life are to blame. They made things worse, according to Chauvin's attorney. It's not Chauvin's fault, but the people who said the police were out of line. What is the emotional value of a defense attorney telling the jury his client isn't fit to be a police officer, that Chauvin buckles and reactsbadly under pressure and this is the result, and it's not his fault but everybody else's for expecting him to not kill the guy accidentally so he killed him on purpose because it was the only thing he could figure to do. See, agitating the cop to the point of poor judgment is the real crime. The people begging for Floyd's life are the guilty ones.

    There are times, actually, when freezing or buckling under extraordinary circumstance is a mitigating factor, but law enforcement is an extraordinary duty, and telling a jury it's not fair to expect a police officer to be better than what Chauvin did is one of the most bizarre things I've ever heard a defense attorney say. On that stage, with the whole world watching, telling the people of Minnesota they cannot have the one thing they are allowed to expect of extraordinary public trust will bring neither juristic nor emotional mitigation.

    †​

    James, think of the idea of a 「behavior, more than a tactic」. I know it sounds strange, but you're aware Americans, and even here at Sciforums, often discuss the effects of equivocation. While the behavior is not unique to Sciforums, it's true we've long suffered a weird sort of equivocation in which rightists simply mimic certain arguments, as if they apply regardless of their function. I say a behavior, more than a tactic, because it's not exactly a strategically plotted thing; there is a certain degree to which it is reflexive, and nothing about any occasion you might encounter such behavior is supposed to be connected to any other, because that's not the way the behavior works.

    At its heart is a rubber-glue component. Once upon a time, a kid shouted, "No, you're the bully!" and when he said the other hit him for no reason, what that meant is that the other finally refused to hand over his lunch money. This actually has a philosophical principle, from von Clausewitz, about how all wars are started by defenders for failing to capitulate to the aggressor's demands.

    And it's one of the reasons why function matters, and viable questions of good faith are important. While the behavior can be organized as some sort of concerted tactical maneuver, it is impossible to ignore the possibility that it is genuine, because it is a very simple, neurotically-driven reaction.

    In the American discourse, a conservative pushing the point that "juries vote their feelings" might actually seem kind of funny, but there is also the part that says, of course he's going to say that when a cop has been caught murdering a Black man. So look at the applicable function of his claim; he is essentially describing a perfect jury that just happened to tack in the right direction at the right moment; when juries voting their feelings is a complaint about how Black people are charged, convicted, and sentenced, the line doesn't get much traction in certain quarters. That suddenly someone from those quarters needs the line? Okay, maybe, but of course it's for this. Even after Chauvin's attorney tried to blame other people for his client's actions, Vociferous went with this superficial line that he is unable to support. He just sort of says stuff, regardless of whether or not it works. It's not really so different from the "own the libs" trend, and even has some overlap. But it's also similar to how the empowerment majority is always the real victim, like how men, or white people, or Christians, are the real victims of supremacism.

    And it's probably also true that your Australian jury experience hasn't much relative meaning compared to the American judicial system and what Vociferous is pushing.
     

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