Minneapolis Police Chief Condemns Chauvin Arrest of Floyd

Arradondo agreed. Nelson also worked to reinforce a theory he has pushed since the trial’s beginning: that a growing crowd of agitated bystanders created pressure on Chauvin and complicated the situation.

He also pointed out that there are some cases in which a knee on the neck was appropriate, and Arradondo placed a qualifier on his earlier statement. 

“It is contrary to our training to indefinitely place your knee on a prone, handcuffed individual,” Arradondo said. 

Nelson’s big coup for the day came near the end of cross-examination, when he pointed out that toward the end of one body-worn camera video, it appeared that Chauvin’s knee was not on Floyd’s neck but on his shoulder blade. Arradondo agreed to that. 

Schleicher quickly worked to reverse course, pointing out that that brief video clip was mere seconds before paramedics took Chauvin off of Floyd. 

Arradondo also reviewed several pieces of MPD’s policies and a document Chauvin signed when he was first hired on to the department in 2001 agreeing to know and abide by those policies. 

That harkened back to an issue of training attorneys discussed Monday morning before witnesses or jurors arrived. Some witnesses have already made statements about what police are and aren’t trained to do, and Chauvin’s attorney Eric Nelson argued that the structure of Minneapolis’ training program makes it difficult to tell exactly which sessions his client attended. 

Prosecutors responded by saying that the training doesn’t change much year to year, and that regardless there was never any training that would have said nine and a half minutes of kneeling on a subject’s neck was acceptable. 

Chauvin faces second- and third-degree murder and manslaughter charges for kneeling on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes, including after fellow officers were unable to find a pulse. 

Whether that actually caused Floyd’s death is a core issue of the trial, and it came to the fore on Monday with testimony from Dr. Bradford Langenfeld, a young doctor who was working as an emergency room physician and serving as a senior resident at Hennepin County Medical Center in May 2020. Langenfeld said he pronounced Floyd dead after he’d been without a pulse for about an hour. 

Langenfeld said he’d identified hypoxia, or low levels of blood oxygen, as the most likely cause of Floyd’s death, having found high levels of carbon dioxide in Floyd’s blood and no other strong contenders. Floyd’s blood carbon dioxide levels, he said, were around 100 milliequivalents per liter.

“For a healthy individual without any sort of lung disease, you would expect somewhere between 35 and 45,” he said. A patient’s blood carbon dioxide level rising that high, he said, “means that they are not eliminating it through ventilation or breathing.” 

On cross-examination, Nelson asked about the impacts of drug toxicity on those levels. The discovery of fentanyl and methamphetamine in Floyd’s system after his death has been at the crux of the defense’s case throughout the trial. Langenfeld confirmed that both drugs could cause high carbon dioxide levels, but that he wasn’t looking at them as a cause at the time. He noted that fentanyl could cause those higher levels by making it more difficult to breathe. 

He also discounted the suggestion that Narcan or Naloxone, drugs used to reverse opioid overdoses, could have helped Floyd.

“Administering Narcan to someone who suffered a fentanyl overdose -- once that person is in cardiac arrest -- administering Narcan would provide no benefit,” Langenfeld said. “The report that I received was that the patient, Mr. Floyd, was unresponsive upon [paramedics’] arrival and without a pulse.” 

He also cast doubt on the suggestion that “excited delirium” — a controversial condition of extreme distress and physical agitation often associated with drug use — had afflicted Floyd. He’d received no information that Floyd was intoxicated, and “certainly there was no report that the patient was ever very sweaty, which is associated with excited delirium,” he said. “The absence of that information was telling, and I did not believe that that was the case here.” 

Arradondo was followed by Inspector Katie Blackwell, who currently leads the police department’s 5th Precinct in southwest Minneapolis. Before taking that gig earlier this year, she led the department’s training division. She recruited Chauvin to be a training officer, she said, and has known him for over 20 years. 

Blackwell, an Iraq War veteran who spoke in the clipped tones of a soldier, kept her testimony focused largely on the training Chauvin went through to become a police officer and later a training officer. She and Schleicher perused records going back as far as 2003, when the department switched from paper records to its current digitized system. 

Blackwell confirmed that Chauvin had received training on positional asphyxia, excited delirium and caring for opioid-overdose patients. 

Judge Peter Cahill also went off-stream Monday morning to hold a brief Schwartz hearing, a process for investigating alleged juror misconduct. The judge found no misconduct after asking jurors to review a statement and someone’s photo and to tell him whether they had made the statement or recognized the person depicted. None had. 

Proceedings are expected to resume Tuesday with a motion hearing. Morries Hall, Floyd’s friend and a passenger in the car he was removed from before his arrest, has filed a motion to quash a subpoena in this case. Hall, who Floyd’s girlfriend Courteney Ross said would sometimes sell him drugs, told the court that he would plead the Fifth if asked to testify.

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