Will a 30-year sentence for Chauvin wake America up?

On Friday, June 25, the world will learn to what degree the American criminal justice system has collapsed under the weight of liberal guilt and leftist terror.

Friday is the day Judge Peter Cahill will impose sentence upon former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin for the May 2020 “murder” of George Floyd.

The prosecutors have asked Judge Cahill to sentence Chauvin to 30 years in prison – two times the upper end of the sentencing range – and Cahill is likely to give them much of what they asked for, perhaps all of it.

Cahill’s finding of facts gave prosecutors the cover to shoot for the moon. As Cahill saw things, Chauvin abused his position of trust and authority and treated Floyd with “particular cruelty.”

Cahill cited two other “aggravating” factors, neither of which Chauvin could control: acting in concert with at least three other people and, bizarrely, committing his crime in the presence of children.

Cahill knows the facts. Ambition may have driven the prosecutors, but only fear can explain Cahill’s misinterpretation of reality. Indeed, fear has driven the whole legal proceeding.

Chauvin is not your average murderer. He did not seek out his victim. By aggressively resisting a valid arrest, George Floyd sought him.

Chauvin did not go to the crime scene voluntarily. The dispatcher sent him. Once at the scene, he found two rookie cops struggling to subdue the muscular 223-pound Floyd in the back of the police vehicle.

Cahill concedes as much. “Although George Floyd was handcuffed, he had still been able to resist and to prevent three police officers from seating him in a squad car. …”

After assessing the scene for a minute, Chauvin did not strike Floyd or tase him. He offered to roll down the car windows and turn on the air conditioning to alleviate Floyd’s anxieties, not routine behavior for a murderer. None of this made Cahill’s filing.

Critically, Cahill also omitted Floyd’s comments when allowed out of the car, “Thank you. Thank you. I want to lay on the ground, I want to lay on the ground. I’m going down, I’m going down. I’m going down.” Floyd seemed less troubled by his laying “against the hard street surface” than Cahill.

Chauvin then called for an EMT. Upon realizing that Floyd was in distress, he upped the urgency level when he called again – again, not a sign of what Cahill called “particular cruelty.”

As to the restraint used by Chauvin while awaiting the ambulance, use-of-force expert Barry Brodd testified at the trial that Chauvin was “acting with objective reasonableness, following Minneapolis Police Department policy and current standards of law enforcement.”

As a result of his testimony, vandals smeared blood on the home they thought Brodd lived in and left behind a pig’s head as a reminder to other “pigs” who might be inclined to testify in Chauvin’s behalf.

While helping Chauvin restrain Floyd, Officer Thomas Lane said, “I am worried about excited delirium or whatever.” Chauvin responded, “That’s why we have him on his stomach.”

According to Cahill, Chauvin abused his trust by “declining two suggestions from one of his fellow officers to place Floyd on his side.” Cahill did not mention that Lane had been on the job for about a week.

In that Chauvin did not testify, Cahill had no way of knowing why he rejected Lane’s advice. His response – “That’s why” – suggests Chauvin was acting to prevent Floyd from hurting himself.

And why would he kill Floyd? Absent in Cahill’s filing, absent throughout the trial, was any hint of motive. Chauvin knew he was being recorded. He likely thought he was doing everything by the book. If he erred, it was in seeming too professional, too cool under fire.

Nor is there any evidence that placing Floyd on his side would have made any difference. Floyd repeatedly said he could not breathe while sitting upright in the patrol car.

Although Cahill made several mentions of “asphyxia” as the cause of Floyd’s death, the medical examiner who did the autopsy made no mention of “asphyxia” at all.

As Dr. David Fowler testified at the trial and as Dr. John Dunn proved>A? in subsequent experiments, the restraint used by Chauvin and his colleagues has no negative effect on a healthy individual.

Chauvin had no way of knowing that the perp – soon to become victim – had two dangerously blocked arteries or that he had ingested enough fentanyl to kill a man three times over and enough meth to finish the job.

No matter. NBC blithely compares Chauvin to a man who beat his mother to death and very nearly did the same to his father. Cahill recently sentenced that man to 15 years in prison.

In November 2019, Cahill sentenced a man to seven years in prison “for shooting at a school bus and wounding its driver during a snowstorm in Minneapolis.”

Although Cahill was not involved in the sentencing, George Floyd was arrested in 2007 for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. The complainant, a female, was reportedly pregnant.

According to the probable cause document, “The largest of these suspects [Floyd] forced his way into the residence, placed a pistol against the complainant’s abdomen, and forced her into the living room area of the residence.”

Floyd was sentenced to five years. He served less than four. Floyd had been arrested nine times. Chauvin just once, but Chauvin could very well serve more prison time than Floyd.

Like the Scottsboro Boys and others, Derek Chauvin made the mistake of being of the wrong race in the wrong place at the wrong time. And unless Cahill acknowledges as much, history will not forgive him.


Jack Cashill’s new book, “Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency,” is widely available. See also www.cashill.com.


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