. A cop followed his training and is going to prison for it....but it does serve the greater good...as does a deceased George Floyd.
yeah-the burning the looting !! )
Its guilty verdict resulted not just from the strength of the evidence, but from a jury-selection process that departed from American norms.
www.theatlantic.com
Additionally, during voir dire, several jurors spoke about their own experiences with police violence, and those accounts were not disqualifying, as they almost certainly would have been in other trials. Doing so is a particularly egregious practice because it ensures that for many Black jurors, past unequal treatment by the police will result in continued alienation from the legal system. Rather than allowing these jurors to draw on what they have learned through their lived experiences as citizens—one of the reasons the Founders fought to include “trial by jury” in the Sixth Amendment—judges have often conveyed to Black jurors that their experiences make them ineligible for service. But, again, that was not the case under Judge Cahill. When questioned about his perspective on the police,
Juror 52, a Black man who works in the banking industry and coaches youth sports, spoke of
witnessing a Minneapolis Police Department officer “body slam and then mace an individual simply because they did not obey an order quick enough.” Juror 52 was nevertheless seated.
While Minnesota has not adopted such a rule, the actions of the attorneys and the judge in the Chauvin case evinced a similar sensibility, because they all seemed to be committed to a racially and politically mixed jury—within certain limitations. When the defense used a peremptory strike against
Juror 76,
a Black man who used to live in the neighborhood where Floyd was killed,
the dismissal followed a familiar script and showed how, even in this case, Black jurors who are candid about their life experiences may be more likely than other jurors to be dismissed by the attorneys. The defense counsel, Eric Nelson, asked the potential juror more questions about a variety of topics—his previous jury service, his brother’s experience with the law, his military service—than he asked other jurors.
Once Juror 76 recalled that the police officers in his old neighborhood used to blast “Another One Bites the Dust” from their squad car after someone in the community was arrested or shot,
Nelson asked him over and over again whether he could be fair, expressed incredulity when he stated that he could, and then proceeded to ask him the question in a different way. Nelson petitioned the judge to remove the juror for cause;
when the judge declined, Nelson decided to use a peremptory strike.