BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY APRIL 5, 2021) — Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with manslaughter, second-degree murder, and third-degree murder in the death of George Floyd, sat passively but attentively during the first week of his trial. Behind him loomed a large portrait of Floyd, surprisingly allowed in the courtroom.

The presence of the portrait, the fact that Chauvin is not being tried in another venue, and the city previously awarding Floyd’s family $27 million in civil damages implying Cahuvin’s guilt all raise questions for THE PLANET about the fairness of his trial. We don’t think Chauvin can get one.

Does he even need one to determine a just verdict?

That’s the agonizing legal point around upon which the case totters.

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One wonders how a Minneapolis jury can possibly put personal feelings aside and judge the case strictly on its merits. This should be of little concern, however, since the trial has jumped its bounds and would do so no matter where conducted. This is not the trial of what one police officer did during a small portion of one afternoon. Rather, it’s an indictment of every police officer and all the institutions of what critics call America’s systemic racism, one of the few things of importance that is black and white.

The prosecution says the case boils down to the nine+ minutes Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck. The defense says the case is actually about much more than that, including Floyd’s behaviors before, during, and after police were called to that crime-plagued section of the city. The first sees the case isolated by Chauvin’s knee. The second sees it in context of a broader chronological pattern. Therein lies the supreme irony of the melodrama.

The prosecution wants Floyd’s death to center only around those nine minutes, yet it seeks to tie the case into what it believes is America’s systemic racism. The defense argues that all of Floyd’s behavior that fatal day, plus his past indiscretions, provide the necessary context for Chauvin’s justified actions, and yet it wishes to explain the nine minutes as within acceptable department policy irrespective of Floyd’s past or skin color.

Chauvin’s prosecutors began with their star “witness.”

The trial ended there. From the moment they appeared on the screens, the indelible images determined the outcome of this case.

No person took the stand.

The screens told their story in a little more than nine minutes.

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The video shows Floyd handcuffed, face down, helpless and pinned, the life slowly ebbing out of him. He tells Chauvin “I can’t breath” 27 times. Floyd’s voice gets throaty as he struggles to keep from suffocating. During all this, Chauvin keeps his knee on Floyd’s neck. The officer has an eerie, disinterested, almost bored demeanor, hands in pockets and attention zeroed out from the action, as if he’s branched away from the wasting life underneath him.

About halfway through the nine minutes, Floyd’s resistance weakens until finally he lies still, not breathing.

Nonetheless, Chauvin doesn’t let up.

And that’s the moment Chauvin lost his own life, professional and personal.

This trial will come down to the fact that Chauvin kept Floyd pinned long after he stop resisting arrest, with his backup standing idly by with colossal indifference.

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Yes, Floyd has a history of run-ins with police, including an armed robbery/home-invasion case in 2007 where he pointed a gun into a woman’s ribcage while his partner pistol whipped her. In 2009, he had a scrape with Minneapolis Police, swallowing drugs then acting irrationally (screaming, calling out for his mama) in what the defense says is the same pattern he showed on May 25, 2020. They say it was Floyd’s act to diffuse the situation by appearing not responsible for his actions.

On the day in question, he passed a fake $20 bill. An autopsy showed he had large quantities of crystal meth and fentanyl in his system. He violently resisted arrest. If he had complied with police instructions, he would still be alive and the world would not have heard of him. He had a heart condition. The cause of death, the defense has argued, could be the combination of drugs in his bloodstream, his cardia condition, and the stress brought on by his arrest that was due to his own reckless behavior.

None of that will matter.

Chauvin has a history of rough handling, including multiple complaints against him. He had a departmental reputation as a “thumper.” Of course, like it or not, every police department has a few thumpers. Policing and public safety has never been a precise science. Often times it comes down to overpowering the bad guys. Chauvin seems to have been an equal-opportunity  thumper. In the Floyd case, it doesn’t appear he went after Floyd because Floyd was black.

None of that will matter.

What matters is that Floyd was black and Chauvin was white.

The jury will find him guilty of manslaughter, not guilty of second degree murder, and guilty of third degree murder.

Will that be the right verdict?

THE PLANET asks but doesn’t answer.

That also won’t matter.

Woke America has taken an undeniable racial problem and has made it into the most cynical form of political currency.

It demands a guilty finding.

This could be one of the rare cases where the interests of the woke left and the interests of true justice coincide.

Better to sacrifice one white cop than to risk every city in America going up in flames from rioters and looters who have driven legitimate protest to the curb, on the ground, with a knee to the neck.

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“It is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself” — Writer Graham Greene.

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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