The MAGA world is abuzz with hopeful chatter that Donald Trump will pardon Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis cop convicted of murdering George Floyd in May, 2020. At this time, it's not clear what Trump's thoughts on the matter are, but right after Floyd died he said: “All Americans were rightly sickened and revolted by the brutal death of George Floyd. My administration is fully committed that, for George and his family, justice will be served. He will not have died in vain.”
But things have changed in the past four years. Elon Musk has said that a pardon for Chauvin is “something to think about,” and conservative Ben Shapiro is circulating a petition calling for Chauvin’s pardon while devoting several of his podcasts to debunking the Chauvin murder conviction. Shapiro, like Trump, condemned the veteran Minneapolis officer at the time of Floyd’s death.
In the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death, most Americans, including me, were certain that Chauvin was a murderer. Joe Biden, the president during Chauvin’s 2021 trial, told the nation he was praying for the “right verdict,” thus further setting the stage for widespread rioting if the jury didn't cooperate. Also fanning the flames was Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), who spoke at a rally in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota and called on protesters to become “more confrontational” if Chauvin were acquitted.
Regardless of Chauvin’s guilt or innocence, nobody can make the case that he received a fair trial in Minneapolis, where he was tried after the city had already given Floyd’s family $27 million in a legal settlement for wrongful death. Nevertheless, the judge in the case denied a change of venue request from the defense while refusing to fully sequester the jury until deliberations had begun. All indications pointed to a guilty verdict as preordained, with the expectation the jurors, the judge, and the prosecutors would all do the “right” thing. Rioters had already destroyed the Minneapolis third precinct police headquarters, and everyone knew what was coming if a “not guilty” ruling emerged from the heavily fortified district courthouse. Every juror knew the violent repercussions they and their family would face for years if they rendered the wrong verdict. Chauvin’s Sixth Amendment right to fair trial was a low priority.
The question is whether or not the public, media, and politicians can look at a nine-minute clip of a cop kneeling on someone’s neck and back and know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a murder was committed. Everyone knew Chauvin did that for nine minutes, but how many knew at the time, or even now, that Hennepin County medical examiner Andrew Baker, in an autopsy he conducted 12 hours after Floyd died, found that the deceased, in addition to having a high methamphetamine level, had a fentanyl level of 11 ng/mL, which he described as a fatal concentration. Floyd also had a bad heart.
Baker told the court he didn't think the defendant's knee caused Floyd’s death, and said in his testimony that the struggle that Floyd initiated with the police was probably too much for his swollen, weak heart to take. The media gave this testimony scant attention, but a question lingers: If Chauvin murdered Floyd by depriving him of oxygen with his knee, why was Floyd’s trachea not damaged, per the testimony of Dr. Baker?
If a trial's outcome is predetermined, a way to discredit such medical opinions must be found. Andrew Baker knew what he was up against. Amy Sweasy Tamburino, an attorney involved in the Floyd autopsy, recalls the medical examiner saying to her, “Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn't match up with the public narrative that everyone's already decided on? This is the kind of case that ends careers.”
On June 1, 2020, two days before Minnesota’s far-left AG Keith Ellison announced the murder charges against Chauvin, the Floyd family's attorney, Ben Crump, publicly described Floyd—who suffered from an enlarged heart, hypertension, and a nearly blocked artery— as a “healthy young man” as he announced the findings of an alternative medical investigation that Floyd’s family had paid for. Dr. Baker’s autopsy was too damaging to the narrative, with its findings that Floyd’s neck and back weren't bruised, that Chauvin's knee was on the side of Floyd’s neck, and that if Floyd had been found dead and alone at home, it would be appropriate to call it an OD.
The alternative, commissioned autopsy declaring that Floyd died from asphyxia from both neck and back compression, was conducted by Dr. Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner of New York City, and Dr. Allecia Wilson. Baden was also hired to conduct an autopsy of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old black man (“Hands up, don't shoot”) shot dead in August, 2014 by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. The doctor determined that Brown’s autopsy didn’t reveal signs of a struggle. The US DOJ, after a lengthy investigation, would later conclude that Brown struggled with Wilson, trying to take away his gun, after which Wilson shot him in self-defense. Despite the Obama administration’s finding, both Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, on the fifth anniversary of Brown's death, tweeted that he was murdered. In cases like Brown’s, the narrative gets set immediately, before the facts are in, and it never wavers.
The Minneapolis fire department, with a station eight blocks away from the scene, took 20 minutes to arrive after police requested EMS assistance. It's reasonable to assume that Floyd, who was obviously suffering a medical emergency as soon as he was apprehended (he was saying “I can't breathe” way before Chauvin touched him), would have had a better chance at survival if not for the bungled response. Moreover, in the documentary film, The Fall of Minneapolis, which covered the Floyd-Chauvin case, six police officers (two of them black) said on camera that Chauvin used what was known as the “maximal restraint technique” on Floyd, and that it was an approved technique within the Minneapolis police department and the city of Minneapolis.
Joe Biden, unaware that he was a major contributing factor to this sad situation, said that even Martin Luther King's murder didn't have the impact on the world that George Floyd's death had. He's right, and it's a damning commentary on the racial environment that the media and politicians have shaped when a racist murder of this nation’s greatest champion for black civil rights gets overshadowed when a white cop with no persuasive evidence of racism against him is involved in the death of a black felon with a long rap sheet.
I see no indications that Chauvin would’ve acted differently had Floyd been white. The media certainly didn't provide them. Those with the power to shape the public narrative on racial issues no longer feel the need to make the case that Chauvin and other white cops involved in such incidents with black men are racists, which is why the exculpatory facts in Chauvin's favor are known by so few.
It's no longer acceptable in progressive circles to apply critical thinking to cases like George Floyd’s, as evidenced by ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith, responding to Ben Shapiro’s calls for Chauvin's pardon, stating that he had no interest in Floyd’s autopsy or toxicology report—a report that Ben Crump said was an attempt at character assassination, a bizarre comment suggesting that toxicology reports in murder cases should be suppressed to spare someone’s reputation. No amount of evidence presented to this tribal group could ever convince them that there's reasonable doubt that Chauvin’s not guilty of murder, which points out the epistemic dilemma this country's facing in not being able to reach a consensus on conflicts involving race.
The Democrats, invested in the strategy of interpreting everything through the lens of race, are too befuddled to see that being a part of creating this toxic atmosphere is one of the things that produced their worst nightmare—Donald J. Trump as their president.