MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – The murder trial of a former Minneapolis police officer charged with the death of George Floyd has introduced viewers around the world to a wide variety of defense and prosecution tactics aimed at influencing the jury .
Some of the strategies and terms that have become part of Derek Chauvin’s trial are rare outside of the criminal courtrooms. The Associated Press took a closer look to explain them better what viewers see and hear.
CONTRIBUTING FACTORS
Video shows Chauvin pinning Floyd to the ground, knee to neck, as Floyd yelled “I can’t breathe” before his body went limp on May 25. But the defense attorneys have a duty to cast doubt on whether the former officer was directly responsible. for the death of the black man. They have tried to argue that other factors, such as drug use, may have killed him.
A medical examiner concluded last year that Floyd’s heart stopped, complicated by the way the police restrained him and compressed his neck. However, narrowed arteries, high blood pressure, fentanyl poisoning and recent methamphetamine use were also listed on the death certificate as ‘other contributing conditions’.
Hennepin County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker testified that those circumstances “did not cause death.”
Chauvin is charged with second and third degree murder and manslaughter.
His attorney, Eric Nelson, has argued that the officer received his training and suggested that Floyd died as a result of illegal drug use and pre-existing health problems.
“I HAVE TOO MANY DRUGS”
Nelson has tried to mock Floyd’s drug use and wanted to show on Wednesday that tat Floyd shouted, “I’ve eaten too many drugs” while officers held him.
Nelson played a short clip from a camera video of a police agency and asked prosecution witness Jody Stiger, a Los Angeles Police Department sergeant who served as an expert in the use of force in the prosecution, if he heard Floyd say, “I ate too many drugs. “
“I can’t understand that,” Stiger replied. Nelson later played it again for senior special agent James Reyerson of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who agreed that Floyd seemed to say so.
But prosecutor Matthew Frank played a longer clip of the same bodycam video that put Floyd’s statement in a broader context.
Reyerson replied, “I believe Mr. Floyd said, ‘I don’t use drugs.'”
EXCITED DELIRIUM
Experts and other Minneapolis officers have stated that the force used to subdue and hold Floyd on the sidewalk was inordinate. Last week, jurors were told about the concept of “excited delirium,” a term One of the officers on the scene is overheard by the police camera as a panicked Floyd writhed and claimed to be claustrophobic when officers tried to put him in the police car.
A Minneapolis officer who trains others in medical care described the term on the stand as a combination of “psychomotor agitation, psychosis, hypothermia, a wide variety of other things you might see in a person, or rather bizarre behavior.”
An expert in forensics who works as a police surgeon for the Louisville Metro Police Department in Kentucky and as a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Louisville testified Thursday that Floyd did not meet any of the 10 criteria developed by the American College of Emergency Physicians.
CITIZEN TECHNOLOGY
Extensive video evidence from surveillance cameras, cell phones, and police cameras of Floyd’s death is perhaps the most critical part of the case for the defense and prosecution.
Modern courtrooms, such as the one where Chauvin is tried, use such technology such as large video screens, projectors and up-to-date software.
Dr. Martin Tobin, a lung and intensive care specialist at Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital and Loyola University Medical School in Illinois, used a computer animation to show how Floyd was held on the sidewalk. It gave jurors a 360-degree view of where the officers were and what they were doing.
He used a composite of photos from a bystander video to show Chauvin pressing his knee against Floyd’s neck. Floyd’s breathlessness grew at the time as officers held him on his stomach, hands cuffed behind his back. The footage showed Floyd trying to use his shoulder muscles to breathe, the doctor said.
Find AP’s full coverage of George Floyd’s death at: https://apnews.com/hub/death-of-george-floyd