Chauvin Trial Judge Gives First Interview—Shouldn't Have!

Confirms How Fear Trumped Justice in a City Under Siege

Four years after he sentenced former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin to 22 1/2 years in prison, Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill gave his first interview about the case. Cahill gave the interview to the friendlies at the Minnesota Star Tribune, presuming that readers would know no more than they did four years ago. That was a mistake on Cahill’s part. The interview does not make him look wise. It makes him look complicit in a fear-soaked sham of a trial.

The reporters, Liz Sawyer and Andy Mannix, asked Cahill some good questions. One was why he denied the defense request for a change of venue from the trashed, terrorized City of Minneapolis. Said Cahill dismissively, “What, are we going to change the venue to Mars?”

My consultant on the Chauvin case, physician and an attorney John Dunn, wasn’t buying. The Sixth Amendment, Dunn argued, established “the right to an impartial jury.” Cahill had a much better chance of finding one in any Minnesota county other than Hennepin. If he could not find such a jury, Cahill would have served justice better by declaring a mistrial.

Another good question to Cahill was why he chose to live stream the trial, the first time ever in Minnesota. Cahill told the reporters. “I thought, no one will trust the result — from either end — if they don’t see what’s going on. All of us hate the spotlight, and we’d rather just do our jobs, but I certainly don’t regret it.”

Dr. Dunn wasn’t buying this either, “No, it was just Cahill's attempt to be another Lance Ito.” Lance Ito, the Los Angeles judge who famously mismanaged the O.J. Simpson murder trial, made the connection. He sent Cahill a card wishing him “peace and wisdom.” In the final analysis, Cahill secured the peace at the expense of wisdom.

Live streaming made sense, however, only if Cahill were confident Chauvin would be convicted. He knew what happened after the LA cops were acquitted for their role in the Rodney King arrest 30 years prior. Everyone did. An acquittal of Chauvin would have caused comparable riots across the country. It would also have put Cahill’s life in danger.

During the interview Cahill let slip the fact that he had pre-judged the case. He told the reporters that his first thought upon seeing the viral video of Chauvin’s restraint technique was, “He’s gonna get charged.” And once charged, Chauvin could not be acquitted.

Cahill would soon learn, if he did not know already, that the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) trained its officers on the use of this very technique. Weeks prior to this interview Hennepin County Judge Edward Wahl established this fact upon dismissing a defamation suit brought by Assistant MPD Chief Katie Blackwell against Minneapolis reporter Liz Collin and Alpha News. Collin had insinuated that Blackwell had lied at the Chauvin trial.

Wahl sided with Collin. Contrary to what Blackwell had claimed at trial, wrote Wahl, “MPD [Minneapolis Police Department] training materials from 2018-2019 … included images of officers applying knees to the neck or upper back.” Blackwell and MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo each testified falsely that the MPD did not teach this technique, and both claimed to have been appalled at seeing it used. In the defamation trial, 33 MPD officers testified that they had been trained on this same technique.

Cahill knew the truth. He had seen the training materials, but he enabled the deception by refusing to let the jurors see what he had seen. My suspicion is that Cahill consented to the interview to undo the damage done by Judge Wahl’s ruling. Although the reporters did not challenge him on Blackwell’s potential perjury, he volunteered nothing to refute it.

Cahill knew Chauvin was “gonna get charged,” not on the evidence, but on the racial dynamics of the arrest: Chauvin was white and Floyd black. As Chauvin’s partner, the still imprisoned Tuo Thao, told Liz Collin, “I’ll put it this way, if it were my knees on the back of Floyd’s neck or black officer Keung’s knees, or Black Chief’s Arradondo’s knees, but for Derek being born white, we’d all still be patrolling the city of Minneapolis.”

As the reporters noted, it was Chief Judge Toddrick Barnette who chose Cahill to preside at the Chauvin trial. What the reporters did not say is that Barnette was the first person of color elected Chief Judge. “It just baffles the mind,” Barnette said in a 2023 interview. “In 2020, in one of the most diverse counties in Minnesota, when there were so many other judges before me deserving of the role. How can it be?”

It could “be” because when Barnette was born Hennepin County was 3 percent black. By 2020, despite a huge influx of Somalians, Hennepin County was still only 13 percent black. Barnette overlooked demographics here to find racism. In the introduction to this interview, not surprisingly, the reader learned that Barnette “prioritizes diversity and inclusion within the justice system.” Chauvin would have been better served had “justice” been his top priority.

Barnette was obviously confident Cahill had the same priorities as he did. He reportedly “hand-picked” Cahill because he “knew that [Cahill] wouldn’t fold under media pressure or community pressure.” Except that Cahill did fold. As Cahill admitted, “Most of the hate mail was, ‘You should have given him life.’ You had pastors condemning me to hell for my ‘light sentence.’” That “light sentence” was 22 1/2 years. Cahill could well Imagine the haters’ reaction had Chauvin been acquitted.

So could Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison. A black activist whose bid to head the DNC was undone by his close ties to the Nation of Islam, Ellison took the case away from the Hennepin County prosecutors when they balked at trying Chauvin’s three fellow officers—Tuo Thao, Alex Kueng, and Thomas Lane. To heighten the fury around Floyd's death, Ellison refused to share the officers’ exculpatory body cam footage until forced to do so by judge’s order.

That judge was Cahill, but Cahill deserves no credit here. He waited ten weeks after Floyd’s death before ordering the release of the footage and only then after the British Daily Mail published a leaked version.

Cahill claimed to have resisted the release for fear “that making the videos public could taint the jury pool for the cases.” In reality, the viral video and ensuing riots tainted the jury pool beyond redemption. The body cam footage would have undone some of the damage. No fan of full disclosure, Cahill had also imposed a gag order on the defense attorneys before yielding to media pressure to undo it. He “regretted” the gag order only because it proved ineffective.

To be fair, Cahill may not have known at the time of Chauvin’s trial Ellison’s most corrupt act. On November 5, 2020—five months before Chauvin’s trial—D.C. Medical Examiner Roger Mitchell boasted to four state attorneys how he threatened Hennepin County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker into adding “neck compression” to the final charging document. That change made Chauvin vulnerable to a murder charge. Dr. Dunn, who has reviewed the otherwise competent autopsy report in depth, was shocked by this gratuitous addition.

The memorandum documenting the November 2020 meeting between the state attorneys and Mitchell only came to light in a May 2021 motion filed by Officer Tuo Thao’s attorneys Robert and Natalie Paule. "The State did nothing in response to this coercion," wrote the Paules. "Instead, the State knowingly allowed Dr. Baker to take the stand in State v. Chauvin and testified to coerced statements.”

If Cahill did not know about the threats by Mitchell and the subsequent evidence suppression by the State at the time of the trial, he did know when he sentenced Chauvin in June 2021, a month after Thao’s motion. He pretended he didn’t. As previously noted, he also ignored what he knew to be false testimony by MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo and Assistant Chief Katie Blackwell.

Wrote Cahill in his sentencing order, “Mr. Chauvin’s continuing insistence that he believed ‘he was simply performing his lawful duty in assisting other officers in the arrest of George Floyd’ and was acting “in good faith reliance [on] his own experience as a police officer and the training he had received’…was rejected by every supervisory and training officer of the Minneapolis Police Department who testified at trial as well as by the jury.” Cahill might have added that they were all scared to say otherwise,

As Cahill acknowledged, for a defendant like Chauvin with zero criminal history points, the presumptive sentence was 150 months or 12 1/2 years. The State asked for an upward adjustment to 30 years due to aggravating factors, one of which was “the presence of children at the scene.” The Solomonic Cahill settled on a happy medium of 270 months or 22 1/2 years.

To their credit, the Minnesota Star Tribune reporters acknowledged the growing criticism of the trial and even cited Liz Collin’s powerful film, “The Fall of Minneapolis.” Cahill claimed to have paid his critics no mind. “The far right, you know, their daily bread is revisionist history,” he pontificated. “But in this particular instance, it’s a lack of trust in the judicial system as a whole, and the jury system, and that’s concerning.”

There is ample documentation to prove Cahill does not deserve trust. The interview only confirms that Chauvin trial was a throwback to the days when race trumped justice. As esteemed jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes who reminded us a century ago, “Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury.”

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