MINNEAPOLIS (CN) — A Hennepin County judge declined to acquit Derek Chauvin or to require George Floyd’s friend to testify on Wednesday morning, leaving Chauvin's attorney to spend the remainder of the morning on direct examination of his first expert medical witness.
Defense attorney Eric Nelson moved for acquittal first thing Wednesday morning, arguing that prosecutors’ case against Chauvin was contradictory and inadequate. Differences between the prosecution witnesses on when Chauvin’s use of force on Floyd became unreasonable and on his cause of death, Nelson said, created sufficient reasonable doubt to torpedo the charges.
“The two [use-of-force] experts that the state has presented, Jodi Stiger and Seth Stoughton -- they even disagree with each other,” Nelson said. He also pointed to testimony about use of force by police department leadership like Chief Medaria Arradondo and a homicide lieutenant, Richard Zimmerman, as contributing to these varied standards.
“While they all ultimately said it was objectively unreasonable at one point, the question is, when did it become? And we have six or seven different opinions on that,” Nelson said. “The state has essentially introduced doubt in the context of presenting multiple opinions, multiple experts, all of which seem to contradict each other.”
He also noted differences among the state’s medical experts and witnesses, pointing out that several expert witnesses attributed Floyd’s death to asphyxia while Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker said Chauvin’s restraint was “too much” for Floyd’s heart.
Prosecutor Steve Schleicher said that Nelson’s argument missed the forest for the trees. “The issue is not whether there are inconsistencies, minor inconsistencies, in what witnesses say. The issue is whether, taken as a whole, the state has proved its case,” he said.
“The witnesses who have testified have all opined that the defendant’s use of force was objectively unreasonable,” Schleicher continued. “He was not trained to do this by the Minneapolis Police Department, he did not follow policy, he did not follow procedure, and the force that he exercised was unnecessary under the circumstances and simply continued on too long.”
He also noted that the medical testimony, while varied, agreed across the board that Chauvin played some role in Floyd’s death.
Judge Peter Cahill quickly denied Nelson’s motion, saying that any inconsistencies were for the jury to evaluate.
“The court’s duty at this point is to look at the evidence in the light most favorable to the state, and even when there are inconsistencies, major or minor, between witnesses, the jury is free to believe some and not the others,” the judge said.
He then moved on to another hot-button issue in the case: the possibility of testimony from Floyd’s friend Morries Hall, who was with him on the day of his arrest.
Hall asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incriminating testimony, but Nelson has argued that he should be able to testify on a narrow basis. Public defender Adrienne Cousins, representing Hall, agreed in a recent hearing to review a list of proposed questions with Hall and determine whether or not they raise Fifth Amendment concerns for her client. On Wednesday morning, she told Cahill that all of those presented a potential threat to Hall.
Cahill zeroed in on questions about Floyd’s appearance in the SUV from which police eventually took him, since he’d previously given tentative approval to those queries. Cousins said that even admitting to being in the car could open Hall up to criminal liability.
“Mr. Hall cannot put himself in that car with Mr. Floyd. Again, this is a car that was searched twice, and drugs were found twice,” Cousins said, arguing that put her client at risk of a possession charge and possibly worse. “We discussed this at the last hearing, judge, but there’s a potentially third-degree murder liability here, under that overdose statute, which is very broad.”
