MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – The murder trial of a former Minneapolis police officer accused of the death of George Floyd has introduced viewers around the world to a wide range of defense and prosecution tactics aimed at influencing the jury.
Some strategies and terms that have become part of Derek Chauvin’s process are rare outside the courtrooms. The Associated Press has analyzed them more closely to explain them better what viewers see and feel.
CONTRIBUTING FACTORS
The video shows Chauvin staring at Floyd on the floor, with his knee on his neck, while Floyd shouted “I can’t breathe” before his body became lame on May 25th. But defense attorneys are tasked with questioning whether the ex-officer was directly responsible for the black man’s death. They have tried to argue that other factors, such as drug use, may have killed him.
A forensic doctor concluded last year that Floyd’s heart stopped, complicated by how police detained him and compressed his neck. However, reduced arteries, high blood pressure, fentanyl poisoning, and recent methamphetamine use were also included in the death certificate as “other contributing conditions.”
Hennepin County Chief Medical Officer Andrew Baker testified that these conditions “did not cause death.”
Chauvin is charged with second-degree and third-degree homicide and homicide.
His lawyer, Eric Nelson, has argued that the officer continued his training and suggested that Floyd died due to illegal drug use and existing health conditions.
“I EAT TOO MUCH DRUGS”
Nelson has tried to replicate Floyd’s drug use and tried to prove Wednesday that Floyd yelled, “I ate too many drugs.” while the officers fixed him.
Playing a small clip from a video from the police corps camera, Nelson asked prosecution witness Jody Stiger, a Los Angeles Police Department sergeant who acted as an expert on the use of police force. the prosecution, if it heard Floyd say, “I ate too many drugs”
“I can’t tell,” Stiger replied. Nelson later reproduced it for senior special agent James Reyerson with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who agreed that this was what Floyd seemed to be saying.
But prosecutor Matthew Frank played a longer clip of the same body camera video that placed Floyd’s statement in a broader context.
Reyerson replied, “I think Mr. Floyd was saying, ‘I don’t do drugs.'”
EXCITED DELIRIUM
Experts and other Minneapolis agents have stated that the force used to subdue and detain Floyd on the pavement was excessive. Last week, jurors were briefed on the concept of “excited delirium,” a term one of the officers on the scene sits on the camera of the police force asking for a panic Floyd twisted and claimed to be claustrophobic while officers tried to put him in the squad car.
A Minneapolis officer who trains other people in health care described the term at the booth as a combination of “psychomotor agitation, psychosis, hypothermia, a variety of other things you might see in a person, or behavior rather. strange “.
A forensic expert who works as a police surgeon in the Louisville Metro Police Department in Kentucky and as a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Louisville said Thursday that Floyd did not meet any of the ten criteria developed by the American College of Emergency Physicians.
ROOM TECHNOLOGY
Extensive video evidence from surveillance cameras, cell phones, and police corps cameras about Floyd’s death may be the most critical part of the case for defense and prosecution.
Modern courtrooms, such as the one where Chauvin is being tried, use this technology such as large video screens, projectors and updated software.
Dr. Martin Tobin, a care and lung specialist at Edward Hines Jr. Hospital. VA and at the medical school at Loyola University in Illinois, he used computer animation to show how Floyd was kept on the pavement. It gave the jurors a 360-degree view of where the officers were and what they were doing.
He used a composite image from a video of the spectators to show Chauvin pressing his knee to Floyd’s neck. Floyd’s breathing discomfort was growing at the time, as officers held him in his stomach, his hands handcuffed to his back. The images showed Floyd trying to use his shoulder muscles to breathe, the doctor said.
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Find full AP coverage of George Floyd’s death at: https://apnews.com/hub/death-of-george-floyd