MINNEAPOLIS (CN) — Just over nine months after video of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck sparked protests and riots around the globe, jury selection for Chauvin’s murder trial is scheduled to begin Monday.
It promises to be one of the highest-profile trials in Minnesota history, and has become a showcase for several criminal-law questions and a battleground for police-accountability activists even as it places the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul on high alert for a repeat of last summer’s riots.
The trial itself is estimated to start near the end of the month after a jury is seated. Chauvin will stand trial alone after a hotly contested severance of his case from that of the three other officers involved in Floyd’s deadly May 25 arrest. Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill originally joined the cases against Tou Thao, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng with Chauvin’s in November, but decided in January that concerns about Covid-19 transmission in the courtroom were reason enough to split the trials again.
The severance order was a backfire for prosecutors, who had advocated for a delay of all four cases after news of new coronavirus vaccines broke but not for a reversal of the hard-won joinder. They sought to challenge Cahill’s split, but the Minnesota Court of Appeals rejected their petition.
The split may be settled, but little else is. University of Minnesota criminal law professor Richard Frase pointed to several factors that could still impact the cases before Chauvin goes on trial.
“One of the things I’m looking for first is, what’s going to happen to the third-degree murder charge?” Frase said.
Chauvin was originally charged with third-degree murder upon his arrest in May, but Cahill dismissed the charge in October, citing a longstanding Minnesota Supreme Court holding that requires a third-degree murder defendant to have taken actions that were dangerous to people other than the victim to be found guilty.
That standard now faces a challenge, and the charge is back on the table. Last month, the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld the third-degree murder conviction of Mohamed Noor, another former Minneapolis police officer, in an opinion that called the Supreme Court’s reading of the third-degree statute into question.
Prosecutors quickly moved to reinstate the third-degree charge against Chauvin and add charges against the other defendants, but Cahill denied that motion, saying that he disagreed with and was not yet bound by the appeals court’s decision, especially since an appeal to the Supreme Court was on its way.
Noor’s attorney Thomas Plunkett, who also represents Kueng, has indeed appealed the Court of Appeals’ decision, and the Supreme Court granted his petition March 1. Arguments in that case are planned for June.
In the meantime, the Court of Appeals has already heard an appeal by prosecutors in the Chauvin case of Cahill’s order declining to reinstate the third-degree charges. Celebrity attorney Neal Katyal, arguing for the prosecution, told a three-judge panel on Monday that their colleagues’ precedent should hold sway unless and until the higher court says otherwise.
"Without action from this court, a landmark criminal case, one of the most important in our nation's history, will take place with a major part of the case — third-degree murder — missing. Nowhere in it whatsoever," Katyal said, according to the Associated Press. "That can't possibly be the law."
Chauvin’s attorney Eric Nelson countered that a reversal would hamper his client’s case and impede his right to a fair trial. He pointed out that Chauvin could be forced to pursue further appeals from prison should he be convicted and the Noor ruling overturned, and said Chauvin’s team had been preparing a defense for second-degree murder for months on the assumption that a third-degree charge was out of the way.
