I haven't seen such a recklessly steered case since the McMartin family was sent to prison based on emotion and politics instead of logic, reason, and evidence. And now, finally, a Minnesota judge will mete out a little justice in the case of Derek Chauvin, the cop who is alleged to have purposely killed George Floyd.
Former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin says that the charges against him were "illegal" and that his trial was a "fraud." The now-imprisoned cop and his lawyer are calling for the verdict to be thrown out because of civil rights violations so severe that the trial became a "one-year-long due process violation."
Minnesota, though a basket case, may have one judge left who knows what justice is supposed to look like.
Chauvin, who used a knee hold to keep a resisting George Floyd on the ground while awaiting backup and an ambulance, was found guilty of murdering the drugged-out fentanyl user who had just taken a deadly overdose to hide the drugs from the Minneapolis Police Department. See more in Officer Chauvin's Knee Was NOT on George Floyd's 'Neck' and 8 Other Things You Didn't Know About This Case.
The cops were called because Floyd, his previous girlfriend, and their drug dealer were passing fake $20 bills at a small store. The drug dealer, who could have been an exonerating witness for Chauvin was allowed not to testify.
Good Question: Did Derek Chauvin Really Kill George Floyd? A Reckoning May Be Coming.
There is a list of jurisprudential horribles (below) so numerous that the former cop is demanding his guilty verdict be tossed.
Liz Collin of Minneapolis's Alpha News first reported that "a new bombshell court filing alleg[es] ‘illegal’ and ‘fraudulent’ conduct by Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office." These are allegations that few will have trouble believing if they've paid attention to the news out of Minnesota during the last five years.
She reported that Chauvin’s attorney, Greg Joseph, contends that there were "structural issues" that were fundamentally wrong in the zeal to get someone behind bars in the wake of the George Floyd riots.
He alleges:
Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter Cahill presided over a year-long due process violation by failing to convene a grand jury to consider the State’s evidence at any point between the moment he was assigned to the case, and the verdict. He lacked jurisdiction over the charges, as this Court does, because they were never lawfully brought.
Joseph contends that a grand jury was never convened to review the evidence behind the charges, because, as he rightly concluded, "Hennepin County’s unlawful charges against Mr. Chauvin were not severe enough for the mob," so Governor Tim Walz instead "referred the case to Keith Ellison, who signed and e-filed a second unfounded complaint against Derek Chauvin that included the murder charge.”
Is anyone surprised that they did everything possible to cut corners to hang Chauvin? Not me.
The filing also claims that the lack of a grand jury “allowed prosecutors to substitute their judgment for that of the grand jury in order to force Mr. Chauvin to face charges that were unsupported by probable cause [emphasis added]."
This is the third time Chauvin has tried to get the charges tossed out, but this time there's no denying that politics and optics motivated every single move made by the state and local prosecutors following the 2020 Minneapolis riots over Floyd's death.
MPR News reported that "the petition claims that Gov. Tim Walz’s assignment of Attorney General Keith Ellison to prosecute Chauvin was 'illegitimate.'”
After that act of state malfeasance called a trial, Chauvin nearly died when a cop hating Mexican Mafia inmate stabbed him 22 times in the prison law library. His wife divorced him after his conviction.
Here are some other things I've found fault within this rush to judgment of Chauvin and the other cops who were there that day. Although I followed the trial and filed stories nearly every day, here's a compendium of the outrages in this one story: 8 Righteous Reasons Why Derek Chauvin Deserves a New Trial –– and That Juror's Shirt Is Only One of Them
- No change of venue
- Jury pressure and bias
- Man lied to get on jury
- Pretrial publicity in Minneapolis
- Defense witness intimidation
- Prosecutorial misconduct
- Floyd's drug dealer allowed not to testify
- Bad jury instructions
- Judge allowing parade of witnesses who were allowed to wail and cry on the stand
- Jury should have been sequestered to avoid pretrial publicity and the circus outside the court
- State had 20 plus lawyers to Chauvin's one
- Completely overcharged the case
It was a travesty. Indeed, as Chauvin's attorney told reporter Liz Collin, the trial was "a one-yearlong due process violation" against him.
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