The Game Changing Evidence the Chauvin Jurors Were Not Allowed To See

Petition For New Trial Shows the Rot at the Heart of Minnesota Government

In an impressively clear memorandum filed last week Minnesota attorney Gregory Joseph petitioned the Minnesota State District Court to allow an evidentiary hearing in the case of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin.

Chauvin is now serving a 22-year sentence for the “murder” of George Floyd in May 2020. Despite the clarity of his petition, Joseph knows the deck is stacked against his client, but damn, Chauvin’s case is compelling. Now only if someone in the State judiciary has the stones to ignore the mob that doomed Chauvin five years ago.

“Five years removed,” writes Joseph, “this case simply never made sense. None of the officers here, including Chauvin, appeared to realize that a criminal act had been committed at all.”

Chauvin’s petition addresses two basic issues, one being “intent,” the other “causation.” More broadly, was the restraint applied by Chauvin and his colleagues consistent with the practice of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD)? And did the restraint used cause Floyd’s death by asphyxiation as claimed?

For simplicity’s sake, I will just address the issue of intent. As is well enough known, the tall, muscular Floyd resisted the efforts of the four police officers to restrain him in the squad car. Saying he could not breathe, Floyd asked to be placed instead on the street and even thanked the officers for obliging him while still continuing to resist.

To restrain Floyd, Chauvin employed what is called the Maximum Restraint Technique (MRT). He placed his knee on Floyd’s upper back and neck area. Officer Alex Kueng restrained Floyd’s butt and upper legs, and Officer Thomas Lane controlled Floyd’s lower legs to keep him from kicking. Meanwhile Officer Tuo Thao controlled rhe crowd. (For this criminal act of crowd control, Thao was just recently released after five years in prison). Having called for immediate EMT assistance, the officers held Floyd in place for nine minutes while they waited for the tragically misdirected EMTs to arrive.

On the right, the slide BATES 2596. On the left, MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo.

In August 2020, defense counsel made a motion to dismiss the charges against Chauvin. In the motion, they showed the photograph on top of the page. Referred to as BATES 2596, it was lifted from a PowerPoint presentation shown to MPD Officers during their formal training.

In February 2021, the State filed a motion to keep BATES 2596 out of evidence. Prosecutors argued that Chauvin had not seen that particular slide during his training, a specious argument all but impossible to prove or disprove. With the defense kept in the dark until the last minute, the State prevailed. The jury never got to see the MPD slide in which a training officer uses the same restraint Chauvin used on Floyd.

For the Chauvin trial, the prosecution relied on what came to be known as Exhibit 17, a still frame taken from the amateur video seen around the world. On April 5, 2021, MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo took the stand. The State showed him Exhibit 17 and questioned him under oath. In his petition, Joseph repeats Arradondo’s testimony.

The State: As you reflect on Exhibit 17, I must ask you, is this a trained Minneapolis Police Department defensive tactics technique?

Arradondo: It is not.

The State: So is it your belief then that this particular form of restraint, if that’s what we’ll call it, in fact violates departmental policy?

Arradondo: I absolutely agree that violates our policy…when I look at the face of Mr. Floyd, that does not appear in any way, shape, or form that that is light to moderate pressure.

Arradondo was followed to the stand by Inspector Katie Blackwell, the commander of training. In an earlier interview with prosecutors, Blackwell conceded that the neck restraint was “technically authorized.” She claimed, however, that had she been on site she would have stopped Chauvin from using it. Testifying right after Arradondo, Blackwell had been coached to tell the prosecutors what they wanted to hear.

State: I’d like to show you what’s been received as Exhibit 17. I’m going to ask you, Officer, as you look at Exhibit 17, is this a trained technique that’s by the Minneapolis Police Department (sic) when you were overseeing the training unit?

Blackwell: It is not.

State: Why not?

Blackwell: Well, use of force, according to policy, has to be consistent with MPD training. And what we train are neck restraints, the conscious and unconscious neck restraint. So per policy, a neck restraint is compressing one or both sides of the neck using an arm or leg, but what we train is using one arm or two arm to do a neck restraint.

State: And how does this differ?

Blackwell: I don’t know what kind of improvised position that is. So that’s not what we train.

The next day. the State showed Exhibit 17 to MPD Lieutenant Johnny Mercil, an MPD training instructor.

State: I’d like to republish Exhibit 17. Sir, is this an MPD trained neck restraint?

Mercil: No, sir.

State: Has it ever been?

Mercil: Not to my - - a neck restraint? No, sir.

To her later regret, Blackwell went on to sue Liz Collin and Dr. JC Chaix for defamation. In their book, They’re Lying: The Media, the Left, and the Death of George Floyd and in their film, The Fall of Minneapolis, they implied that Blackwell had lied on the witness stand.

To defend themselves against the suit, the authors reached out to 34 current and former MPD officers. These officers provided sworn statements claiming the “MPD trained them to use a knee-to-neck restraint in a variety of situations, including as part of the MRT process.” In his petition, Joseph presented a representative sample of those statements:

—“Not only was the knee-to-neck/upper shoulder restraint trained, its use was common knowledge and part of MPD policy.”

—“Besides me, I know that numerous MPD officers were trained to place their knee on the side of a subject’s neck when dealing with a combative subject. It was common knowledge; it was trained in the open; and I saw numerous MPD officers perform it in training and in the field.”

—”It is necessary for an officer to pin a person to the ground while handcuffing the same person, and officers’ use of knee-to-neck/upper shoulder restraint was common during use-of-force training when I was at the MPD.”

The suit against Collin, et al. was dismissed in April by Hennepin County Judge Edward Wahl. The special motion dismissing the suit contained several images of MPD Officers taken during training as they employed the same knee-to-neck restraint used by Chauvin in Exhibit 17.

The most damning of those images showed Blackwell herself using the MRT technique on a college rioter. If anything her “victim” seemed more distressed than George Floyd. From the look on the rioter’s face, to quote Chief Arradondo, it “does not appear in any way, shape, or form that that is light to moderate pressure.”

In his summary, Joseph calls out the MPD brass for their dissembling: “Uniquely damaging in this case was the way the false testimony of Blackwell, Arradondo, and Mercil in combination with the jury instructions and the improper expert testimony, functioned together to destroy the State’s burden of proof on two elements of the crime of Second Degree Murder.” The medical evidence Joseph presents in his 71-page petition is at least as damning.

“Derek Chauvin was deprived of his right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution and Article I of the Minnesota Constitution, as set forth herein,” concludes Joseph. “He requests vacation of his sentences and a new trial. In the alternative, he requests an evidentiary hearing to address the issues raised in this Petition and memorandum.”

In their futile effort to appease a largely imported minority community, the good liberals of Minnesota have abandoned the very fundamentals of liberalism on just about every front imaginable.

Where, one wonders, are the Hubert Humphreys of yesteryear?

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