This payout by the city of Minneapolis won’t affect the Chauvin trial – no, not at all
The Minneapolis City Council has made a decision to settle a civil lawsuit:
The city of Minneapolis on Friday agreed to pay $27 million to settle a civil lawsuit from George Floyd’s family over the Black man’s death in police custody, as jury selection continued in a former officer’s murder trial.
Council members met privately to discuss the settlement, then returned to public session for a unanimous vote in support of the massive payout. It easily surpassed the $20 million the city approved two years ago to the family of a white woman killed by a police officer.
Floyd family attorney Ben Crump called it the largest pretrial settlement ever for a civil rights claim…
These cases are Crump’s specialty, and lying to the press about them is also his specialty (I’ve written about Crump before, in particular here in connection with the Jacob Blake case, and he was involved in the Trayvon Martin case as well as the Michael Brown case and of course the Floyd case). I don’t know exactly how it works, but I’ve read that lawyers take one-third of settlements, and if so then Crump will net a cool nine million.
More from Crump:
It wasn’t immediately clear how the settlement might affect the [Chauvin] trial or the jury now being seated to hear it. Crump said the settlement is a way “to help shape what justice looks like” rather than waiting for a result from a legal system that many Blacks distrust.
“The one thing we know as Black people … is there is no guarantee that a police officer will be convicted for killing a Black person unjustly in our country,” Crump said. “That’s what history has taught us.”
It wasn’t immediately clear? It certainly can only have a prejudicial effect on the Chauvin trial – as has almost everything that has transpired in the news so far. Crump’s statement that the settlement will “help shape what justice looks like” is one of the rare times he’s telling the truth, but that truth is pernicious. It shouldn’t help shape what justice looks like, although it probably will.
And of course there’s no guarantee that “a police officer will be convicted for killing a Black person unjustly in our country.” Nor is there any such guarantee if a white person is unjustly killed, although Crump couldn’t care less about that. The city of Minneapolis may be happy to agree that Floyd was killed unjustly, but the evidence in the case has yet to be heard in a court of law and the evidence I’ve seen so far supports the alternative conclusion that he was killed by the drugs he ingested.
And lastly, if you follow the statistics, black people are actually slightly less likely to be killed by police officers (justly or unjustly) than white people are if you take into account the differing crime rates for each race, and the vast majority of killings of all people by police are in self-defense. Crump isn’t interested in those statistics – and neither is Google, by the way, because I couldn’t get to the articles discussing it at Google and gave up after several pages of looking. DuckDuckGo was much better, as it usually is: I found this article at position number three on search page one. For those interested, Heather Mac Donald has done a lot of good work on the subject, for example this book.
That $27 million represents 15% of the entire budget of the Minneapolis police, by the way, close to 2% of the city’s entire budget for the coming year.
But I understand why the City Council made the decision it did, actually. First of all, the members are decidedly to the left. But secondly, the standard of proof for a civil suit is much lower than for a criminal proceeding, and the pretrial propaganda has been such that the city would probably lose any such battle no matter what exculpating facts might emerge in the trial.
At the Powerline blog, Paul Mirengoff at least thinks this might be grounds for a mistrial. How can the jurors who have been selected, and the rest of the jury pool, not be aware of this settlement? Minneapolis admits its police were guilty of causing Floyd’s death, when determining that is what the trials are about.
I call Crump the black “Gloria Allred.” Shows up in every high profile case a black person gets killed trying the case in the media.
I saw an image of a tweet from popular Youtube pundit/commentator Tim Pool.
It read
riots are-a comin’
He has replied to Jack Posobiec’s tweet”
Breaking: Juror #36 notes that “if George Floyd had complied with officers, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Selected for the jury
The prosecutor let that go by? Crazy unless it’s a false-flag and the guy is secretly a BLM activist.
Looks like planning for riots, at the verdict, and at the appeal, and after the victory at the appeal (?). This should keep the riots going for at least 4 years. Never let a crisis you can manufacture go to waste.
Chris Rock gives good advice. Sure it’s made to be funny but everything he says is really very good advice.
https://youtu.be/uj0mtxXEGE8
Council members met privately to discuss the settlement, then returned to public session for a unanimous vote in support of the massive payout. It easily surpassed the $20 million the city approved two years ago to the family of a white woman killed by a police officer.
That’s the Justine Damond case in which a white woman called the police, the squad car arrived, and she went out to speak to the officers. The black Somalian officer panicked and shot her in the abdomen. She died 20 minutes later.
The officer was convicted of third-degree murder and sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Justine_Damond
Between Damond and Floyd the cases seem apples and oranges to me, but you be the judge.
huxley:
Yes, extremely different fact situations. Another big difference is that the city waited until Noor was found criminally guilty before the payout. See this.
People in Minneapolis deserve what they sought (Somali immigrants in the tens of thousands) and elected (Leftists).
I was last in that city ~15 years ago, on business. Stayed in a new downtown hotel, which in the evening turned out to be an attraction for cool teens and twenty-somethings, raucous, ill-mannered and drunk. Now they are taxpaying residents, presumably some even married, with kids. Serves them well. No judgment or manners then or now.
MPLS may go down the drain faster and further than NYC.
I can’t help but think that the Minneapolis city council was motivated, in part, by a desire to pollute the jury pool for Derek Chauvin’s trial. For ideological reasons, they want Chauvin convicted.
After a conviction, they want to see the mob celebrate. After an acquittal, they’d see the mob riot. More buildings would burn, and more people would die. They’d much rather sacrifice the life of Derek Chauvin.
Progressives have become not merely dangerously foolish, but also explicitly evil. When the state uses its power to murder an obviously innocent police officer, what else are we supposed to call it?
shipwreckedcrew at RedState.com also has a post about this too. Don’t know how to link from my phone, sorry.
om, the link:
https://redstate.com/shipwreckedcrew/2021/03/13/payout-of-27-million-to-family-of-george-floyd-could-derail-criminal-case-against-officer-derek-chauvin-n342875
Shipwreckedcrew doesn’t say it’s grounds for a mistrial, but he does say that the denial of change of venue was provisional. With the obvious problems of finding unbiased jurors, and now this, he thinks it’s grounds to revisit the change of venue motion.
Yes, the lawyers will get about 1/3 of that AFTER they get their expenses paid from the settlement amount. Almost everything the law offices do is billable. That is to say every photocopy made is billable, every phone call made is billable, every paper filed is billable, etc.
Even so, the family will have a huge sum of money left over. Just what will they do with it? Will the Al not-too-Sharptons of the world con them into giving him some? Will Black Lives Matter get their hands in there too?
Even after all the sharks have taken some, they might still have money left over. Then what will the family do?
My guess is that they will treat it as a complete windfall to be spent foolishly. And then when it is all gone they will claim that they were tricked some how or other.
If I recall correctly Floyd had a lethal dose of fentanol in him before the police arrived. He was a dead man. I am waiting for the prosecution to prove you can murder a dead man.
Ray:
Problem is, a lethal dose can vary. So they can claim it wasn’t lethal for Floyd – for example, if he was a hardened addict, his tolerance would be higher than normal. That sort of thing.
The other way they could approach it is by saying that, despite the lethal dose, Chauvin’s actions killed him before it could take effect.
Problem is, a lethal dose can vary. So they can claim it wasn’t lethal for Floyd – for example, if he was a hardened addict, his tolerance would be higher than normal. That sort of thing. The other way they could approach it is by saying that, despite the lethal dose, Chauvin’s actions killed him before it could take effect.
Since he was complaining about having difficulty breathing when he was sitting bolt upright and he was also foaming at the mouth, the notion that the dose ‘wasn’t taking effect’ is rubbish. The level in his femoral blood (11 nanograms per cc) is a middling value for an overdose death. And, again, what’s the mechanism which kills him if not the fentanyl? The prosecution would offer these arguments to give the the jack-wagons on the jury a specious excuse to do what they feeling like doing anyway. There’s an ample population who are motivated by emotion, demagogy, and status considerations. They come from every walk of life and some will end up on that jury.
neo,
Chauvin followed established Minneapolis police procedures.
If memory serves, the autopsy stated that Floyd died from a drug overdose and reported there was no damage to Floyd’s neck. If so, upon what basis is there for prosecuting Chauvin?
Cornhead correctly asks, “When the state uses its power to murder an obviously innocent police officer, what else are we supposed to call it?”
You can bet that virtually every police officer in his country thinks of it in exactly those terms.
The entire Minneapolis police force should immediately resign upon Chauvin’s conviction and the 74 million Trump voters should support them until they find new employment.
Time to hold every Council Member, AG and every voter who supports them, personally responsible. Change is dependent upon consequence.
Between Damond and Floyd the cases seem apples and oranges to me, but you be the judge.
Among the differences: the state police and the local prosecutor took their bloody time with the case, the other police officer on the scene had to be put under oath in front of a grand jury before he would provide any information, and the trigger happy fool was a special project of Mayor Betsy Hodges and had had performance problems in the academy (which somehow did not prevent him from passing the course). Again, this officer Noor iced an unarmed, 40 year old woman in a pink bathrobe and did so for no discernible reason.
The cynical money says Noor’s case gets tossed because the 3d degree murder charge is inappropriate and then the prosecutor cuts a deal for a slap on the wrist / time-served penalty. For Democrats, courts are just another tool to attack political enemies and Justine Damond was a low-status person killed by a higher-status person.
Geoffrey Britain:
Yes, in previous posts I’ve discussed the fact that the knee on the neck was a proper procedure. However, it was only recommended under certain circumstances, so there will be two issues at least: the first is whether this fit those circumstances, and the second was whether it was done with the proper technique. In addition, the autopsy did not say Floyd died of an overdose. The toxicology report stated the level of fentanyl and other drugs in his blood; it did not come to any conclusion about whether the drugs killed him. However, there is a report of a phone conversation in which the pathologist said that, if there had been no police involvement or other mitigating circumstances, and the same blood level of fentanyl was found, he would have said it was an OD.
Art Deco:
It’s not whether the drugs were taking effect, it’s about the timing of when they would have killed him or whether they would have killed him that is in question. IMHO I think he died of an overdose, but I’m reporting the way I think the arguments will go in court. I also think it highly likely the jury members are compromised because of propaganda plus fear of riots.
However, I would have thought the same to have been true of the Zimmerman jury and the grand jury in the Ferguson case. And yet that’s not what happened.
Neo,
Floyd’s lungs were full of liquid. He couldn’t breathe. He drowned.
Ray:
Yes, I know. As I said, I believe he died of an overdose. But the lung evidence did not cause the pathologist to say he died of an overdose. The prosecution will argue that he did not, and I have little doubt they will find someone to say the lung evidence does not mean he died of an overdose. For example, I have read that lungs can fill with fluid as a result of CPR or certain kinds of heart problems.
You have to remember that the medical examiner got the job because he was the lowest bidder not because he was the most competent. When you die you will dissected by the lowest bidder. There was a case here where a guy made a bungee cord and jumped off an overpass. The bungee was too long. The medical examiner just said he died of severe trauma to the upper body. That sure doesn’t give you any idea of what actually killed him.
Ray:
And yet the opinions of a medical examiner are certainly considered relevant in a trial.
Trial by press. The em-pathetic evidence is overwhelming.
neo,
Based on what I know of the case, your post and replies to commenters here are very likely a realistic prediction of how the prosecution will present the case and the hurdles the defense will have to get over. I appreciate your effort to unbiasedly consider the facts. In all sincerity you would have been a very good reporter. It is a shame there are not more actual reporters with your skill and ethics.
}}} because I couldn’t get to the articles discussing it at Google and gave up after several pages of looking. DuckDuckGo was much better, as it usually is
Indeed. As I’ve noted elsewhere on the blog, Google openly censors certain sites (i.e., search for a direct headline, and Google doesn’t share it, if it’s ‘media non grata’, such as Red State.)
Two noticed examples (bold is search term to compare):
stop it already, he’s not so smart
A piece from American Thinker, about Obama.
and
jake tapper fact checks jake tapper
A Red State piece, about how Jake Tapper openly lied after the Trump-Biden debate… in Tapper’s own words from Twitter.
Google refuses to provide either piece. DDG provides them as first or second entry.
DDG is my default search engine, now.
Partisan beliefs don’t matter, here. GOOGLE IS CENSORING INFORMATION.
}}} The prosecution would offer these arguments to give the the jack-wagons on the jury a specious excuse to do what they feeling like doing anyway. There’s an ample population who are motivated by emotion, demagogy, and status considerations. They come from every walk of life and some will end up on that jury.
Eh? Not clear what your point is, here. Yes, some idiots will vote to convict for no good reason. All it takes is one strong person to say, “Fuck off, not convicting”. And that’s more common than people realize, it’s why so many cops get off even when there is a less specious case against them… Someone may damned sure think the cop likely did something wrong… but can’t say for certain they did, hence, acquittal.
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and:
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}}} There was a case here where a guy made a bungee cord and jumped off an overpass. The bungee was too long. The medical examiner just said he died of severe trauma to the upper body. That sure doesn’t give you any idea of what actually killed him.
Hey, it’s obvious what actually killed him. The same thing that killed Floyd:
Abysmal stupidity.
😀
OBloodyHell:
That wouldn’t be an acquittal, it would be a hung jury. A hung jury results in a mistrial, and the person can be tried again.