Column: Derek Chauvin case appeal: Could America handle this again?
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
When former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd, cities across America still not recovered from violence out of last year’s Floyd protests breathed a sigh of relief.
And not a small sigh either, but a big one. Mayors and governors who had National Guard troops at the ready were certainly relieved. So were business owners who lost nearly everything in the protests last summer.
Alternate juror Lisa Christensen said she would have found Chauvin guilty, but she also said this:
“I did not want to go through rioting and destruction again and I was concerned about people coming to my house if they were not happy with the verdict,” she told a Minneapolis TV station.
Now comes news that Chauvin’s lawyers have filed a motion for a new trial on several grounds, including witness intimidation, jury misconduct and whether jurors felt raced-based pressure during the trial. And Brandon Mitchell, one of the 12 jurors who convicted Chauvin, may not have answered truthfully on his jury questionnaire.
A photo of Mitchell circulating on social media and making its way onto news sites shows him at a march in Washington, D.C., last August. Part of the annual March on Washington to honor Martin Luther King Jr., the event also included a “Get Off Our Necks” commitment march, according to one of the organizers, National Action Network.
In the photo, Mitchell is wearing a shirt with the phrase “Get your knee off our necks” and “BLM” for Black Lives Matter.
Trial and jury experts have said this could be problematic and raise serious questions about whether Chauvin received a fair trial from an impartial jury.
Does this mean we go through it all over again?
Lawyers will argue this out in court. Judges will rule. I’m not a lawyer. Perhaps you aren’t either. But even if we haven’t passed the bar, as citizens, we should be asking other questions, such as:
What does due process mean anymore? Is it now subject to desired political outcomes, and leveraged against vague politically-laden phrases such as “social justice?”
Before the trial began, potential jurors were asked if they or anyone close to them had “participated in protests about police use of force or police brutality.”
Mitchell told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he answered “No.”
Mitchell was one of the 12 jurors who convicted Chauvin on charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter.
Mitchell told the Star Tribune that he was at the rally to honor King, not to march against police brutality. Floyd’s family were featured speakers.
“I’d never been to D.C.,” Mitchell said of his reasons for attending the event. “The opportunity to go to D.C., the opportunity to be around thousands and thousands of Black people; I just thought it was a good opportunity to be a part of something.”
The murder of George Floyd had great impact on all of us, especially Black Americans who could not help but see it through the prism of America’s racist past and other cases of police brutality. And Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck looked like murder to me.
What bothers me, though, were the threats of violence if the verdict didn’t come out the way some wanted.
Some threats were overtly made, like the rantings offered up by U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, who was in Minnesota and encouraged that mob rule triumph over the rule of law, prompting an admonishment from the judge overseeing the case.
“We’re looking for a guilty verdict,” Waters said while sensitive closing arguments in the trial were underway. “We got to stay on the street. And we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”
We know what you mean, Maxine.
The trial judge called her comments “abhorrent” and said they would most likely serve as basis for a Chauvin defense appeal. And they most certainly could.
Criminal cases have been tossed out before over jury bias. One involved the Boston Marathon bombers.
________
Columns are opinion content that reflect the views of the writers.
________
Last year, a federal appeals court overturned the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of murder in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. The federal court ruled that the trial judge did not sufficiently check jurors for bias. At least one of the jurors had used Twitter to express strong opinions toward the defendant.
When we don’t step back and consider facts the way juries are told to consider them, without passion, bad things happen. And when we demand that political considerations and righting the wrongs of the past are leveraged in a criminal trial, we toss due process out the window.
Here’s hoping that people of good faith may disagree, but also that they remember something that the left and the right once held to be vitally important:
Every defendant is entitled to a fair trial.
Want more John Kass? See all his columns and find his weekly podcast here.
Twitter @John_Kass
