Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s view of George Floyd’s death remained unknown on Thursday as the defense rested its case in the ongoing murder trial, set for closing arguments next Monday.
His decision to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights may have surprised many, but made sense to Madison-area veteran criminal defense attorney Chris Van Wagner.
“It would have been an opportunity for the prosecutor to play that tape again and stop it repeatedly and really pile on from an emotional perspective,” Van Wagner said. A grilling cross-examination of why Chauvin didn’t lift his knee at any point during the minutes-long incident would be the last thing left on the jurors’ minds heading into deliberation.
But the choice not to testify–one entirely on the defendant to make–highlights an unusual facet of the case all the same: a video that chronicles the entirety of the incident he’s charged in.
“It’s a case that started and will end with video of the entire sequence of actions that the state said constitutes the crime,” Van Wagner explained. “That is incredibly unusual. Rarely do you have the entire sequence caught on clear video that the prosecution contends is a criminal act.”
But video in such cases is only likely to become more prevalent with the widespread use of cell phones and surveillance cameras, he noted. Phones pulled out to record pieces of the action have been factors in several recent police shootings in Wisconsin, including the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha and a shooting in Wausau in early 2020 where a brief clip of the encounter went locally viral.
Chauvin, 45, is charged with murder and manslaughter in Floyd’s death after his arrest on suspicion of passing a counterfeit $20 at a neighborhood market. The video of Floyd gasping that he couldn’t breathe as bystanders yelled at Chauvin to get off him triggered worldwide protests, violence and a furious examination of racism and policing in the U.S.
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