A revealing behind-the-scenes look at the legal proceedings surrounding the murder of George Floyd.
In a lucidly written narrative that deftly handles a variety of legal tangles, Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, observes that, though he was deeply troubled by Floyd’s murder and its place in a “wheel of policing” of deeply embedded racism, he was obligated by his oath of office to be evenhanded and fair—and more, “to be perceived that way.” In a season of unalloyed injustice, a swirl of police killings of other young Black men, this was easier said than done. The Minnesota AG’s office assumed ownership of the case from the start, unusually, with some legal experts assuming that the officer charged in the killing, Derek Chauvin, could not receive a fair trial in the city. Instead, Ellison and his team, sometimes against and sometimes with the cooperation of the defense, selected “the single most diverse jury I had ever impaneled”—no easy matter in itself. The argument Ellison and his team mounted was not simply that Chauvin had gone murderously rogue as his fellow officers stood by (and refused to allow a passing paramedic to examine Floyd), but that Chauvin and company knew they were violating procedure. On that note—and of systematic application in examining police brutality elsewhere—Ellison writes, “Something buried inside the culture of the MPD determined the behavior Chauvin displayed and the other three mirrored, regardless of training, policy, or strategy.” That culture, he suggests, requires thoroughgoing reform that may not be politically popular; the test for him came soon after the trial. “Can a prosecutor charge, prosecute, and convict an officer and survive reelection?” Ellison asks meaningfully. “The voters said yes. But so much more needs to be done.”
A vital contribution not just to the literature of the Floyd trial, but to that of police reform generally.