After reviewing the evidence in the Derek Chauvin case earlier this week, Washington D.C. lawyer Harold Cameron came to a conclusion that surprised him: “Derek Chauvin did nothing wrong.”
The presumption of Chauvin’s guilt rests on three assumptions. These have seemed to most people to be as undeniable as they are obvious. They have shaped the major media reporting and analysis for nearly an entire year since the death of George Floyd on Memorial Day of 2020.
These assumptions are:
- That Floyd’s life-sustaining supply of oxygen was cut off at his neck, as photos and videos appeared to indicate.
- That the source of his complaint of being unable to breathe was the stress placed by Chauvin on Floyd’s respiratory system.
- That by an alternative course of action Chauvin and his fellow officers would have removed the fatal cause of Floyd’s distress, enabling him to breathe and live.
First, and most startlingly, video footage of Chauvin and Floyd from other angles, not heretofore viewed by the American public, demonstrates Chauvin’s knee rested not on Floyd’s neck but his shoulder-blade, as even the state’s witness for the prosecution agreed. The iconic images of the officer’s knee on Floyd’s neck was created by the angles available for photography to onlookers and the fact that such images are two dimensional.
Second, Floyd was already complaining of difficulty breathing when police arrived and said he was unable to breathe at the very beginning of the encounter. His distress did not originate with contact with the police. Nor was his stated inability to breathe serious enough to prevent him from the significant physical exertion required to resist transfer to the police cruiser, continue to resist on the ground, or prevent him from speaking to officers while restrained on the pavement.
Third, Floyd died with lethal amounts of the drug fentanyl in his blood stream. Respiratory distress is a characteristic outcome of a fentanyl overdose.
The police believed he was suffering the negative effects of drugs. Even Floyd himself believed that, if the recording of his words muttered as he lay on the pavement and his symptoms became acute are correctly interpreted as “I ate too many drugs.” In fact, when Floyd was stopped, Maurice Hall, Floyd’s drug dealer, was a passenger in his car, along with Floyd’s addict girlfriend, “Mama” Courtney Ross.
“The fact that Floyd was dying of a drug overdose does not itself absolve Chauvin. Neither would him dying of a drug overdose while he had COVID and heart disease,” Cameron observes, noting the law school adage that a man who shoots and kills a person who has just jumped from the top of a building is still guilty of murder.
That, however, is not this case, Cameron reports.
None of the state’s witnesses have pointed to any notable injuries to the dead man’s neck. While Chauvin was supposedly choking the life out of him, Floyd continued to speak and resist. A good portion of the state’s witnesses’ medical testimony is devoted to claiming that — like the lethal amount of fentanyl in Floyd’s blood — the jury should simply ignore this.
Chauvin didn’t tase Floyd, put him in a chokehold, or beat him with a baton.
Rather the entirety of the state’s case against Chauvin, now rests on classifying as murder Chauvin’s decision not to “let Floyd go because he was still complaining about being unable to breathe, just as he had been since the beginning of the encounter.” It also requires that doing so would have reversed the effects of a lethal fentanyl overdose.
Much of the popular perception of wrongdoing, Cameron points out, stems from “the public’s inability to comprehend how difficult it is to control an adult human who does not want to be controlled.” The public overlooks the impossibility of a 140-pound person controlling a muscular, 6’ 4”, 230-pound man by any means resembling a “civil-looking application of force,” much less doing so “while a circling crowed threatened him with violence.”
The perception of wrongdoing also stems from the public’s lack of knowledge of the purpose of Floyd’s detainment, Cameron observes.
Despite Floyd’s crimes, the police were not there to do him harm, but were there waiting for the paramedics they called to arrive — waiting and holding Floyd in place after he repeatedly resisted attempts to get him into a police car, waiting while a threatening mob bayed.
It is not reasonable to believe that Chauvin’s releasing Floyd would have reversed the effects of lethal quantities of a drug that just the year before, in 2019, killed 36,000 Americans — four people every hour, every day. It is reasonable, however, to believe that had Floyd been allowed to leave, he also would not have received the medical assistance due to arrive in minutes.
For all of these reasons, it is also reasonable to believe that “reasonable doubt” has not only been achieved but surpassed in the Derek Chauvin trial, that even innocence itself has been established, Cameron states.
Free Press International
