‘Believe your eyes,’ prosecutor tells jury during closing arguments in Derek Chauvin trial

Fired Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin knew what he was doing and clearly heard George Floyd gasping for air and begging for his life — but he “just didn’t listen,” a prosecutor told the jury Monday during closing arguments in the ex-cop’s murder trial.

Prosecutor Steve Schleicher urged jurors to use “common sense” and believe what they saw in the graphic bystander video of Floyd’s deadly arrest last spring.

“Believe your eyes. What you saw, you saw,” he said at the beginning of a nearly two-hour statement to the jury.

Schleicher was followed by defense attorney Eric Nelson, who argued that Chauvin did what any “reasonable” police officer would have done if faced with a resisting suspect in a “dynamic” situation. The 19-year police veteran followed the law, his department’s policy and his years of training when he used “non-deadly force” to “physically manage” Floyd on May 25, Nelson told the jury.

When Nelson began his lengthy arguments, Chauvin took off his face mask in front of the jury and kept it off for the first time during the trial.

Each side’s final words to the jury come after three weeks of witness testimony and almost a year after Floyd’s in-custody death, which sparked nationwide outrage and fueled a historic movement for racial equality and police reform.

Schleicher acknowledged “it may be hard” for many people to believe a police officer could commit murder, but he asked the jury to put their “bias aside” and understand that this case is not a referendum on the police.

“To be very clear, this case is called the ‘State of Minnesota vs. Derek Chauvin.’ This case is not called the ‘State of Minnesota vs. the police,” Schleicher told the jury.

“The defendant is not on trial for being a police officer. He’s on trial for what he did,” the prosecutor said as he reminded the panel about the multiple officers who testified that Chauvin’s actions were unreasonable and disproportionate.

Both the prosecution and defense reminded jurors about some of the key testimony in the case and replayed portions of bystander and surveillance video from the deadly incident. Schleicher used the evidence to bring home the state’s argument that Floyd died from positional asphyxia, or low oxygen levels, because of Chauvin’s use of force that day.

Nelson, meanwhile, tried to convince the jury that Floyd died from sudden cardiac arrhythmia combined with illegal drug use and other underlying health conditions. He repeatedly told the jury that his client still has the presumption of innocence and that the state failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

The cop-turned-murder suspect, who was caught on video kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, is charged with second-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter and third-degree murder. The jury must consider each charge separately and, if it chooses to convict, the panel must find that Chauvin’s actions were a “substantial” factor in Floyd’s death.

The 12 jurors who will decide Chauvin’s fate will be sequestered until they are done with deliberations, which could end as soon as Tuesday or last several days.

The Minneapolis courthouse where the trial is taking place is surrounded by fencing and National Guard troops in anticipation of protests this week. The city has been on edge in recent days over the trial as well as the fatal police shooting of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black driver who was killed by a white cop last week in neighboring Brooklyn Center, just miles away from the court.

Schleicher began his closing statements recalling Floyd’s final moments as the unarmed Black man was pinned on the ground by Chauvin and two other cops.

“George Floyd died face down on the pavement right on 38th and Chicago, in Minneapolis — nine minutes and 29 seconds, nine minutes and 29 seconds,” he told the jury. “During this time, George Floyd struggled, desperate to breathe, to make enough room in his chest, to breathe. But the force was too much.

“He was trapped,” Schleicher said. “He was trapped with the unyielding pavement underneath him, as unyielding as the men who held him down, pushing him, a knee to the neck, a knee to the back, twisting his fingers, holding his legs for nine minutes and 29 seconds.”

Nelson took issue with the state’s characterization of the police encounter, which started nearly 17 minutes before Floyd was placed on the ground.

“The state has really focused on the nine minutes and 29 seconds,” he said. “It’s not the proper analysis because it ignores the previous 16 minutes and 59 seconds. It completely disregards it.”

Chauvin, 45, was called to the scene as backup and found two rookies struggling to place Floyd in the backseat of a squad car, Nelson said. Police had been told that Floyd appeared to be on some sort of drugs and had just used a fake $20 bill at a convenience store, the attorney recalled, adding that his client concluded that the two officers at the scene were using “insufficient” force to arrest the 46-year-old man.

Addressing Floyd’s repeated pleas that he couldn’t breathe and was claustrophobic, Nelson said reasonable police officers know that many suspects fake medical emergencies “simply because they don’t want to go to jail.”

“It takes a lot of oxygen to talk,” he told the jury. “You’re breathing fine if you can talk.”

As he did throughout the trial, Nelson sought to raise doubt in the jury about Floyd’s cause of death. An autopsy ruled it as cardiac arrest with heart disease, fentanyl intoxication and recent methamphetamine use as “other significant conditions,” but multiple medical experts testified for the prosecution that the drug use and Floyd’s heart disease did not play a major role in his death.

“It wasn’t a heart attack, it wasn’t a drug overdose, it wasn’t carbon monoxide,” Schleicher told the jury as he described Chauvin’s refusal to get his knee off Floyd’s neck.

The prosecutor also blamed Chauvin’s “ego” for refusing to listen to bystanders’ desperate pleas to stop kneeling on Floyd’s neck and check the dying man’s pulse.

“The defendant chose pride over policing,” he said.

Schleicher went on to describe Floyd’s desperate attempts to expand his chest to get enough room to breathe — by pushing his shoulders and face against the pavement and his knuckles against the tire of a squad car. The horrifying scene showed Floyd had no “superhuman” strength, as the defense tried to suggest during the trial, Schleicher said.

“There’s no superhuman strength because there’s no such thing as a superhuman,” he told the jury. “Those exist in comic books. And 38th and Chicago is a very real place. Not super humans, only humans, just a human, just a man lying on the pavement, being pressed upon, desperately crying out, a grown man crying out for his mother.”