MINNEAPOLIS (CN) — Prosecutors laid into the medical case against Derek Chauvin on Thursday in the former officer’s murder trial for the death of George Floyd, giving jurors a morning of testimony from a prominent Chicago pulmonologist who said Floyd’s death could have happened to anyone.
That was followed by a toxicologist who assessed the levels of methamphetamine in Floyd’s system as comparable to prescription use and said his fentanyl metabolization wasn’t consistent with an overdose, and a Kentucky police physician who backed up the pulmonologist’s contention that Floyd died of asphyxia while debunking the possibility that he was suffering from “excited delirium,” as one officer suggested on scene.
“A healthy person, subjected to what Mr. Floyd was subjected to, would have died,” Chicago pulmonologist and critical care physician Martin Tobin said during over four hours of testimony.
Tobin, who hails from Ireland originally and spoke with a slight accent, walked jurors through his evaluation of Floyd’s deadly arrest Thursday morning. He explained the mechanics of breathing in normal conditions, then walked through the various factors preventing Floyd from taking in enough oxygen in the first five and a half minutes that Chauvin knelt on his neck.
Those factors, he said, included Floyd’s prone position, which allows for less air intake even under normal conditions by reducing the range the lungs have to expand. The pressure on Floyd’s back and position of his handcuffed wrists added to that. “They were forcing his left wrist up into his chest, forcing it in, tight, against his chest, forcing it high up,” Tobin said. “The ability to expand his left side here is enormously impaired.”
The compression, he said, also tightened a vulnerable spot in the trachea known as the hypopharynx, which Chauvin’s knee served to compress further.
Asked about the prone position’s usual impacts on breathing, Tobin said that without complicating factors it could impair breathing but not dangerously so. “The average person, you have so much reserves” of air in the lungs, he said, “but if you have someone with a knee on the neck … then that’s a whole different kettle of fish.”
That became evident, he said, as the 9 minutes and 30 seconds Chauvin spent on Floyd’s neck ticked on. He specifically addressed some of Floyd’s last movements as efforts to improve his air intake. At one point, Floyd moved his head to push his face into the pavement. That position, Tobin said, helped keep his throat and chest open.
“You can see that Mr. Floyd has his face rammed into the street, because here he’s using his face to try to prop up his chest,” he said. When the side of Floyd’s head hit the street again, Tobin said, his breathing again suffered. “In this position, there’s going to be far greater compression.”
Tobin pointed to a small kick Floyd made near the end of five and a half minutes and the look on Floyd’s face around the same time as evidence that Floyd was on his way out. “That is something we see as clinicians in patients when they suffer brain injury as a result of a low level of oxygen,” he said of the involuntary leg movement.
“I work in an ICU, where 40% of our patients die, so I’m extremely familiar with seeing people die, unfortunately,” Tobin said. He said that around 2 minutes and 55 seconds before Chauvin got off of Floyd, jurors could “see the moment when his life leaves his body.”