That doesn’t make any difference at all. If you shoot a man and the shock causes his bad heart to go haywire and kill him, you are just as guilty of murder.
Based upon this theory, you are never guilty if you kill a person in less than perfect health. 
(Bolding mine)
Did the ME’s report establish that Floyd’s air intake was constrained by Chauvin’s knee? If so, it would seem to shut down the whole “it was the fentanyl” narrative.
Derek better get his bags packed. The prosecutor has slammed a home run. Testimony today with the Chief and training officers is devastating.
I found Inspector Katie Blackwell’s testimony very interesting. She was commander of the Minneapolis police department’s training division. She worked with Chauvin in a community assignment. She even assigned him as a field training officer.
It’s so confusing what went wrong. A officer with almost 20 years experience. He had modern training and worked in a community officer assignment. He knew how important community outreach is in modern policing. Why he lost control and used dangerous methods against a suspect doesn’t make sense.
He’ll be lucky to get convicted of manslaughter. Depends on the jury. They may go for one of the murder charges.
I think the Field Officer Training courses hurt Chauvin’s defense the most. Blackwell and the prosecutor did a good job explaining Chauvin’s extra training mirrored what the Rookies get at the Academy.
Chauvin was supposed to set an example for the Rookies. He certainly let down the entire force.
He certainly has set an example for the rookies.
Fentanyl and opioids put a person DOWN and compliant. Not up and resisting.
If Floyd was highly tolerant to opioids, then they had little effect, and have no bearing on this case (other than to besmirch his character with “ooga booga dark man had druggy blood”).
If he wasn’t tolerant to opioids, and had a high amount in his system, then the police detained a sedated and near-unconscious man, and stood on his neck for 8 minutes staring smugly into the camera while the life trickled out of his body.
Shocked but not surprised that anybody would see film of a passive man dying on the sidewalk with a boot on his neck, and hear a medical doctor testify that he died due to lack of oxygen to his brain, and still attempt to deploy the “doped-up negro supersoldier” defense in this day and age. But I honestly hope they try it.
The available evidence suggests that he was a bad cop who didn’t give a shit, and never gave a shit, and this is probably just the first time he got caught on camera.
I find myself dogged by a conspiracy theory that somebody powerful slipped him some cash and said “we need a race-based media circus to serve as a distraction; go snuff a black guy and we’ll have your back when things are more secure for us.”
I know it’s crazy and it hurts Occam’s feelings, but not dramatically more than some other news stories that have come out in the past 5 years.
22 complaints before this - all but one which the union managed to keep from becoming disciplinary actions. Minneapolis’ police department is trying, there are more than a few bad cops - but its union is horrifying.
And the 5th precinct where this went down - and is the precinct I used to live in, is known for a poor community culture. I lived there 25 years ago (five blocks from that corner) - and as a young white early career professional woman had few problems with the local police…but not everyone had my experience even then.
Of course it isn’t. (See, I can use that rhetorical tactic, too.)
First off, the easy part: You talked about the crowd, which has no bearing on what they would need to do to constrain Floyd for a lawful arrest. It would at most say what they might need to do to deal with the crowd.
The harder part: saying that Floyd tried to escape doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not the choice to hold him for that long was necessary for an arrest, or whether that particular move was these least forceful action necessary to do so.
And of course not everyone acts like Floyd was a real human being. Have you not been watching the reporting on this? There was tons of dehumanization by the the pro-Chauvin side of the media. They very much did try to victim blame. Plus there is just always the tendency where criminals get dehumanized, while cops get valorized. And then there’s the tendency to care about the person you can actually see and not the person who is now dead. There’s every reason to believe that a juror might be predisposed to seeing Floyd as less of a person.
And that’s without getting into the fact that this trial is seen by many to be part of a larger endemic issue where cops wind up getting away with being overly violent with or otherwise mistreating black people. There is the general sentiment that a white Floyd would have been treated differently, since all he did was pass a counterfeit bill (which he may not have even known was counterfeit). It’s important for political reasons that this trial be seen by the parties involved as entirely legitimate. Remember that, in a democracy, even the legal system rests on the consent of the governed.
I do, however, take your point that, if everyone else is being addressed as “[Mr/Ms] Lastname”, using his first name might actually serve the opposite purpose. I do think the use of “George” is to make him seem more like some guy you might actually know, but I can see why that could backfire.
First off, sorry about the other post. I was getting ready to reply to you, but needed to submit my post to UltraVires first. I didn’t notice that it put the reply to you, and I don’t see how to edit that out.
Anyways:
Obviously the crowd are not at fault in the situation. Nothing they did contributed to what happened.
And, assuming that their means of holding him was improper, then, no, I don’t see how his action that would not have reasonably led to his death should be seen as making him partially responsible for his death.
I will also say that, my understanding of all this has always been that Floyd was an anxiety sufferer who self-medicated with Fentanyl (thanks US healthcare). And I know that, if you put me in a high stress situation and then tried to confine me, I might try to leave to. Not because I want to resist, but because my fight or flight reaction would be in place.
I don’t think it’s fair that “fear of one’s life”—i.e. a fight or flight reaction—can allow for justifiable homicide, but not allow that someone might have that reaction to police, who tend to deliberately intimidate.
As far as I’m concerned, all that matters is whether Chauvin’s action was the cause of Floyd’s death, whether Chauvin should have known that his actions could cause his death, and whether or not Chauvin’s actions were actions were unnecessary.
The answer to all of the above seems to be yes.
The autopsy showed that Floyd had both fentanyl and meth in his system. Floyd was unlikely to be highly tolerant of opiods because the clerk who called police said that Floyd was visibly high when he tried to pass the counterfeit bill. He then fell asleep behind the wheel of the car before the police arrived.
At his previous arrest Floyd ingested all the drugs he was carrying, if he did the same thing during this arrest he may not have been affected for a couple minutes.
Actually it is different, IMHO. Floyd needed to be restrained and the more he fought back, the more he needed to be restrained. However, once cuffed was it justified to kneel on his neck and keep doing so for 9 minutes? That I think is the question to be answered and I don’t see how it could be any answer other than “no”.
That makes it okay to kneel on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes, which could quite clearly kill an entirely healthy person? If not, who cares?
This means absolutely nothing. Store clerks aren’t trained to diagnose drug intoxication; even had the clerk detected he was “off”, it indicates absolutely nothing regarding his tolerance level.
Perhaps it was this thing that you imagined, or perhaps it was we actually saw on camera: a policeman using banned lethal restraint technique on a man who was already in handcuffs and barely moving.
In spite of what you’d like to believe, the penalty for having drugs in your system is not execution by cop.
What was the mistake? Do you think it wasn’t intentional when he used a banned restraint technique that he’s been trained not to use on a man who was already restrained.
Or do you mean his mistake was getting filmed?
To be clear, there is no capital punishment in Minnesota. You could rape and kill children and the state would not execute you. And there is no place in the country where the possible sentence for passing a phony $20 while high is execution. As a state, we have decided that there is no crime that warrants death.
Chauvin didn’t place Floyd on his side(recovery position). Lane even asked, place him on his side? and Chauvin said Nope.
The recovery position has been brought up repeatedly during the trial. It’s known that the prone position cuts off breathing.
That appears to be a contributing factor in Floyd’s death. There are other factors too, like the knee pressure.
That’s a non-sequitur. Your “because” doesn’t even make sense.
Opioid tolerance comes from long-term use, and the dosage escalation needed to overcome increased tolerance. A long-time opioid user can tolerate doses of fentanyl/heroin/methadone/whatever that are multiples of what would flat-out kill you or me.
A long-time opioid user is also quite likely to be visibly high, or nodding out, while under the influence. After all, getting high is kind of the whole point, right?
IMHO, that’s a (pardon the pun) “cop out”. The union has the duty to fairly represent it’s members. If the union files a grievance over one of its member’s discipline the employer has every right to deny the grievance and stand its ground. If the employer capitulates that’s on them. If the union pushed the matter to grievance arbitration and the employer lost, then that proves they did not have just cause for the discipline imposed.