He does not have to invoke the 5th. Your rights are your rights and they don’t need to be invoked to turn them on. The prosecution can not call a defendant as a witness in a criminal trial. Full stop. He can chose to go on as a defense witness and of course would be crossed but nothing has to be done to keep the prosecution from calling him.
Thanks for the clarification. I tend to think of the 5th as the catch-all “I don’t have to talk” excuse, which isn’t correct.
Not exactly, Rule 611 (b),
(b) Scope of Cross-Examination. Cross-examination should not go beyond the subject matter of the direct examination and matters affecting the witness’s credibility. The court may allow inquiry into additional matters as if on direct examination.
While this is a federal rule I’ve seen this objection in dozens of lower-level jurisdiction trials.
So, for instance, the prosecution can’t ask “Why did you continue to kneel on Floyd after he stopped moving?”, if that’s not a topic the defense raised? A shame… I’d love to hear the answer to that question.
I just finished watching the coroner testimony. Floyd was facing a lot of future health problems. Coronary disease was going to eventually get him.
I know Chauvin 's actions during the arrest killed Floyd.
Minnesota law has a couple of types of third degree murder. One is depraved heart murder, for which the statute reads:
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.
It looks to me like the prosecution is presenting a case for this. The testimony of bystanders who were pleading with Chauvin to listen to Floyd’s pleas is evidence for this type of murder.
I was reading something about it being a huge bar to get over to get a conviction on this though I might have confused it with another charge, something about this being a charge you might see if someone wasn’t trying to kill someone in particular but say shooting into a large crowd of people.
There’s probably no way to know what jurors are thinking and putting a defendant on the stand is generally risky stuff. I’d be more than surprised if he were allowed to testify.
I’m genuinely baffled that people think it’s relevant that George Floyd had drugs in his system and had pre-existing health conditions. Even kneeling on on a healthy persons neck for 9 minutes is going to kill them.
Has anyone ever done an in depth series of articles, or a book, objectively examining what the hell Marcia Clark was thinking?
It’s debatable whether his knee was on his neck. Two witnesses answered yes that Chauvin’s knee was on his shoulders.
Great Game India? WTF is that site?
Reading their Covid page,
should tell everyone everything they need to know.
Vincent Buglioisi (most well known for being the prosecutor who convicted Charlie Manson, and who later co-wrote Helter Skelter) wrote a very critical book about the entire OJ case, including mistakes made by the DAs, bad rulings by the judge, and arguments he would have made. It’s called “Outrage”.
My expectation is that the jurors will decide this themselves, based on watching the videos during jury deliberations, as opposed to deciding based on what witnesses testify. I can imagine some spirited debate, but from the angles I’ve seen it’s hard to deny that Chauvin was - at minimum - compressing Floyd’s breathing for an extended period of time.
What about the associated press?
Nelson also questioned whether Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s neck, playing a few seconds of bystander video side-by-side with footage from an officer’s body camera that Arradondo agreed appeared to show Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s shoulder blade.
It casts reasonable doubt that his knee was in his neck or that it was the entire time, they talked about the different camera perspectives.
He wasn’t static he shifted his body around at various times
But Chauvin isn’t on trial for simply kneeling on Floyd’s neck. He’s on trial for taking his life, by compressing Floyd’s breathing with his knee. Wherever that knee was particularly compressing isn’t as terribly important as the underlying fact that Chauvin was restricting Floyd’s ability to take in oxygen.
And testimony has graphically described how these movements were Floyd’s desperate attempts to breathe (e.g. he was pushing against the ground and a tire to try to get oxygen into his lungs)
Yes but there are also questions about Use of Force including about the safety of the scene with regard to the gathering crowd that legally leaves a lot to the officer’s discretion. One of the prosecution’s witnesses I’ll have to look up his name again actually gave some pretty damning testimony about suspects under the influence of drugs, the defense even asked that they later be able to call his as a witness.
I’m not saying he isn’t guilty of anything, he likely might be, but there is a higher bar I think than a lot of people believe.
Well, it’s true that the defense desperately wants there to be questions/doubt about this, but the use of force experts called so far, as well as the defendant’s police chief, have effectively testified that these “questions” are not really in question, that the use of force guidelines are clear, and that the crowd was not a real factor.
I know you are paraphrasing the defense argument, but this is nonsense. When an officer conducts an investigation, the preferred procedure is that another officer (or more than one) serve as backup, precisely for the purpose of watching the scene so that the primary investigating officer can focus on their task.
This comes up frequently in DUI cases (perhaps the most common criminal investigation). At least one other officer will stand by. If that officer later testifies, they typically won’t be able to credibly testify to whether the driver was drunk, because they will testify that that was not their role. They were watching for everything other than the degree of impairment of the driver (e.g. bystanders who might interfere), so that the DUI officer could do their job.
And this is confirmed in the Floyd case. One of the officer’s body cam shows the crowd of bystanders. Why? Because he was watching the crowd (and not Floyd), precisely so that Chauvin could focus on Floyd, and not the crowd.
Of course, the police line of thinking is that Chauvin needed that focus in case Floyd became violent, but it applies equally well to the off chance that he was in need of assistance.