I've watched it quite a few times now. I don't think it is as damning as people say it is, but neither does it show Chauvin in a good light.
Floyd is acting erractically from the moment they approach his Mercedes SUV. He continues to do so while on the pavement. At some point they decide to arrest him and try to put him in the cruiser. He starts saying he is claustraphobic at that point and for the first time he claims he cannot breathe. The cops are trying to calm him down - for example offering to keep the windows of the cruiser open, and one officer says he still stay with him. However, Floyd continues to resist and that that point they decide to put him on the floor. He starts saying he cannot breathe again even though he is talking etc. It is only after he continues to resist while on the floor that the knee is involved.
Where things start to look worse for the cops, IMO, is when they continue with restraint even after he stops moving and on-lookers say he has stopped breathing and become unresponsive. It is difficult to say that they should not have turned him over and assessed him at that point (and in reality started CPR). The paramedics were certainly ineffective too - they simply put him on the gurney and into the ambulance again without making a BLS assessment or starting CPR.
However, I thinkt the prosecution has a long way to go on the medical side. The fact he was acting irrationally and saying he couldn't breath could point to a cardiac event that began early in the arrest and the outcome of which was, at worst, compounded by the cops's failure to begin early CPR. He certainly seemed to be under the influence of drugs which have been toxicologically proven.
If he walks it will be beacuse of the defence experts showing there is doubt that the knee on the neck contributed to his death.
"Where things start to look worse for the cops, IMO, is when they continue with restraint even after he stops moving and on-lookers say he has stopped breathing and become unresponsive."
Crypto - that's is the only point at which their conduct matters : I don't believe we would be here if Chauvin had taken his knee off when he became unresponsive (and definitely if he had taken his knee off him when Floyd apparently began to seize).
To remind you - the timeline in the video was:
"4 minutes and 45 seconds as Floyd cried out for help, 53 seconds as Floyd flailed due to seizures and 3 minutes and 51 seconds as Floyd was non-responsive."
(Taken from a news report, NBC or CNN, I think - as I mentioned above, I watched it once, I will never watch it again, so if that is incorrect, then feel free to correct it).
Given Floyd's behaviour before and during the early part of the arrest, if Chauvin had stopped kneeling when he got clearly sick, this might be a story about whether or not that restraint should continue to be used at all, maybe even about a perception that the police tend to excessive responses when dealing with black men (and even that could have been dealt with relatively easily by addressing the fact that Floyd had a pretty extensive criminal past, with one conviction for a violent offence) - maybe Chauvin would have lost his job, I suspect the other officers might even have kept theirs, but I am as sure as I can be that this would not have become a criminal matter.
And, I think you are absolutely right that his only chance rests on whether the defence can establish that the knee did not contribute to his death. And, thinking about it, presumably, the prosecution would need to convince the jury that it was that "extra" 4 minutes that did it - I assume that (given that the restraint itself was lawful) the time before Floyd started seizing / became unresponsive can pretty much be "ignored"?
Also - question for you : you say "...the outcome of which was, at worst, compounded by the cops's failure to begin early CPR"
How is that possible? I mean, how is it possible that the outcome was not compounded by the pressure on the neck, which must have made it harder to breathe (even if he was still able to shout out), and made his already stressed heart have to do more work (even if he was still able to talk.
As an aside, I think that the defence need to be quite careful about going down the "but he could still shout, so couldn't have been too bad!" route. Whether it's medically correct or not, everybody believes that our bodies are capable of incredible, superhuman feats when we are fighting for our lives, so his yelling will, I reckon, be seen as the last desperate efforts mustered by a man who was literally begging for his life, I reckon that trying to use it as an attempt to downplay the effects of the kneeling might backfire spectacularly.
At the end of the day it was a risk position by the police to use that hold and continue using the hold in the face of warnings when the guy stopped moving - the risk crystallised, the guy died while in the hold - I think getting into the causal link using imprecise medical analysis of how much actual impact the knee had isn’t really relevant to a manslaughter charge - Unless it can show in the tox report the guy was dead from the drugs no matter what happened after (even then there is the question of whether aid could have saved him and whether the police et all breach a duty of care there) it’s pretty difficult to establish the knee was not casually relevant to the death.
you can see from my posting on this board I am pretty sceptical of BLM as a political movement (here in the U.K. at least) but to me this was a failure by that individual to discharge his duty which resulted in a death.
It’s not about the wider political implications it’s simply the fact the man is dead and the policeman’s approach appears on the face of it to have materially contributed to that death - it should be a manslaughter conviction.
the spicy bit would then be sentencing - you would get a riot anyway for 6 years or less but then the arguments around his training, the lawfulness of the hold etc would factor in.
Having watched the video, I don't think it's as damning as people say. In the first half of the video, they don't kill anybody. It's only in the second half that they kill someone. So it's mixed, I would say.
"As an aside, I think that the defence need to be quite careful about going down the "but he could still shout, so couldn't have been too bad!" route. Whether it's medically correct or not, everybody believes that our bodies are capable of incredible, superhuman feats when we are fighting for our lives, so his yelling will, I reckon, be seen as the last desperate efforts mustered by a man who was literally begging for his life, I reckon that trying to use it as an attempt to downplay the effects of the kneeling might backfire spectacularly."
I'll defer to Crypto on this but I think you can only make sounds like that if you have sufficent breath going past the vocal chords, and that has to come from the lungs, and accordingly if he is talking reasonably normally he has enough to oxgenate his blood. I don't think yelling is just a matter of effort, without actually breathing air its just not possible.
I'll defer to you, Cru, on the best strategy for the defence to address that point but once they have the doctor on the stand it will be hard, if not impossible to say, that Floyd's airway was compromised whilst he was talking and shouting. The audio is far from perfect but I've listened to it a few times and I'm not hearing any sounds of airway compromise. Furthermore to talk requires brain perfusion and he was clearly talking (I can’t breathe, asking for his momma – which he started doing before the knee, incidentally) meaning that not only did he have a patent airway but he had open cerebral vasculature.
Even a partisan prosecution expert would have trouble saying otherwise. Now it is quite possible that something changed (e.g. the position of knee to neck) that did result in a compromise after the 4min mark and that is what caused Floyd to become unresponsive. I’m sure that point will be raised in evidence.
From what I’ve read the defence will seek to argue that Floyd died of a “medical event” during the arrest caused by his significant natural disease (he coronary arteries were awful) and drug intoxication. If they can do this and say that Floyd died at 3 min 51 (or thereabouts) then they’re home and dry seeing as no reasonable medical expert can argue his airway (or cerebral vasculature) was compromised up until that juncture as evidence by him talking/shouting.
Once you’re into he died of “natural causes” it becomes very hard to tease out which part of the arrest (the knee, the takedown, etc) that tipped his heart over the edge.
It really is going to come down to the pathologists and other doctors on the stand and how good the respective lawyers are at cross examination.
"Furthermore to talk requires brain perfusion and he was clearly talking (I can’t breathe, asking for his momma – which he started doing before the knee, incidentally) meaning that not only did he have a patent airway but he had open cerebral vasculature."
I'm not a doctor but I just don't see how this can be right.
If you have a perfect chokehold you pass out very quickly. If it is imperfect (as kneeling on one side of the neck must be, in fact is designed to be) you are impeding blood flow to the brain but not entirely cutting it off.
So yes, you have some open cerebral vasculature. And yes, you will be able to speak for some time. But that doesn't mean the blood flow is not being impeded. Or that at some point your brain will be starved of oxygen to an extent that you will pass out (and then die).
Surely it doesn't need "something to change" after 5 minutes or whatever.
Put another way - if you have 25% or 50% of normal blood flow to the brain (I don't know where the right percentage would be, but) surely you will last quite a few minutes but then ultimately black out from lack of oxygen?
Hard to say. The body tends to maintain cerebral perfusion at all costs including reducing blood supply to other areas (e.g. the gut). I'll also note that there was no evidence of hypoxic-ischaemic injury to the brain on the micro (https://www.hennepin.us/-/media/hennepinus/residents/public-safety/documents/floyd-autopsy-6-3-20.pdf) which suggests a fairly quick sequence of events rather than a slower developing asphysxia of the type you're describing (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6490582/ although generally it takes about 10mins of hypoxia to develop changes). There were no petichial haemorrhages which again suggests that venous return from the brain (i.e. the jugular veins) wasn't compromised.
Question for you - and I'm sorry if I already asked this, but I just can't get my head around it : let's take it as a given that he had drugs in his system, but, according to the reports "Dr. Bradford w**khede Langenfeld treated Floyd and said the "more likely possibility" of Floyd's cardiac arrest was hypoxia, or lack of oxygen", isn't that the same thing as saying that the pressure on his neck caused his death? Or would "hypoxia" occur solely as a result of the drugs?
It isn't quite the same thing but what is is saying is that he didn't think it was a direct effect of drugs on the heart. It doesn't mean it wasn't drugs acting via another mechanism or that it was pressure on the neck.
Dr. Bradford w**khede Langenfeld is an A&E guy and a bit out of his depth commenting on this TBH. He isn't trained to investigate causes of death or opine on a medically complex death like this.
I think Chauvin is pretty screwed as a result of the prade of police officers who have testified that that arrest wasn't as per protocol. Unless the defence pathologists can do an excellent job of showing that the death wasn't due to the neck compression it looks like the big house for Degsy.
This trial is over. As soon as the (black) police chief took the stand and said the use of force was egregious Chauvin's fate was sealed. He's going down and good job too.
USA expert witnesses seem to have a different approach to ours. What does an ITU doctor know about causes of death? I don’t think you’d see this in the U.K.
I see Chauvin's decided not to give evidence. Bold move as its only him who could claim that he wasn't putting that much pressure on the neck, I would have thought in the absence of that the default conclusion would be that he was. His medical experts so far seem pretty meh but have cast doubt on the cause of death (he only has to convince one jurior), maybe he thinks enough has been done to get it down to manslaughter and he doesn't want to risk messing it all up on cross and getting murder.
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CAN I JUST REITERATE WHAT AN EXCELLENT WATCH THE VIDEO IS?
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT: ALSO IT’S THE PERFECT LENGTH TO WATCH DURING A BREAK WHEN YOU’RE SLOWLY SAVOURING A NICE HOT MUG OF COFFEE
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I've watched it quite a few times now. I don't think it is as damning as people say it is, but neither does it show Chauvin in a good light.
Floyd is acting erractically from the moment they approach his Mercedes SUV. He continues to do so while on the pavement. At some point they decide to arrest him and try to put him in the cruiser. He starts saying he is claustraphobic at that point and for the first time he claims he cannot breathe. The cops are trying to calm him down - for example offering to keep the windows of the cruiser open, and one officer says he still stay with him. However, Floyd continues to resist and that that point they decide to put him on the floor. He starts saying he cannot breathe again even though he is talking etc. It is only after he continues to resist while on the floor that the knee is involved.
Where things start to look worse for the cops, IMO, is when they continue with restraint even after he stops moving and on-lookers say he has stopped breathing and become unresponsive. It is difficult to say that they should not have turned him over and assessed him at that point (and in reality started CPR). The paramedics were certainly ineffective too - they simply put him on the gurney and into the ambulance again without making a BLS assessment or starting CPR.
However, I thinkt the prosecution has a long way to go on the medical side. The fact he was acting irrationally and saying he couldn't breath could point to a cardiac event that began early in the arrest and the outcome of which was, at worst, compounded by the cops's failure to begin early CPR. He certainly seemed to be under the influence of drugs which have been toxicologically proven.
If he walks it will be beacuse of the defence experts showing there is doubt that the knee on the neck contributed to his death.
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"Where things start to look worse for the cops, IMO, is when they continue with restraint even after he stops moving and on-lookers say he has stopped breathing and become unresponsive."
Crypto - that's is the only point at which their conduct matters : I don't believe we would be here if Chauvin had taken his knee off when he became unresponsive (and definitely if he had taken his knee off him when Floyd apparently began to seize).
To remind you - the timeline in the video was:
"4 minutes and 45 seconds as Floyd cried out for help, 53 seconds as Floyd flailed due to seizures and 3 minutes and 51 seconds as Floyd was non-responsive."
(Taken from a news report, NBC or CNN, I think - as I mentioned above, I watched it once, I will never watch it again, so if that is incorrect, then feel free to correct it).
Given Floyd's behaviour before and during the early part of the arrest, if Chauvin had stopped kneeling when he got clearly sick, this might be a story about whether or not that restraint should continue to be used at all, maybe even about a perception that the police tend to excessive responses when dealing with black men (and even that could have been dealt with relatively easily by addressing the fact that Floyd had a pretty extensive criminal past, with one conviction for a violent offence) - maybe Chauvin would have lost his job, I suspect the other officers might even have kept theirs, but I am as sure as I can be that this would not have become a criminal matter.
And, I think you are absolutely right that his only chance rests on whether the defence can establish that the knee did not contribute to his death. And, thinking about it, presumably, the prosecution would need to convince the jury that it was that "extra" 4 minutes that did it - I assume that (given that the restraint itself was lawful) the time before Floyd started seizing / became unresponsive can pretty much be "ignored"?
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Also - question for you : you say "...the outcome of which was, at worst, compounded by the cops's failure to begin early CPR"
How is that possible? I mean, how is it possible that the outcome was not compounded by the pressure on the neck, which must have made it harder to breathe (even if he was still able to shout out), and made his already stressed heart have to do more work (even if he was still able to talk.
As an aside, I think that the defence need to be quite careful about going down the "but he could still shout, so couldn't have been too bad!" route. Whether it's medically correct or not, everybody believes that our bodies are capable of incredible, superhuman feats when we are fighting for our lives, so his yelling will, I reckon, be seen as the last desperate efforts mustered by a man who was literally begging for his life, I reckon that trying to use it as an attempt to downplay the effects of the kneeling might backfire spectacularly.
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At the end of the day it was a risk position by the police to use that hold and continue using the hold in the face of warnings when the guy stopped moving - the risk crystallised, the guy died while in the hold - I think getting into the causal link using imprecise medical analysis of how much actual impact the knee had isn’t really relevant to a manslaughter charge - Unless it can show in the tox report the guy was dead from the drugs no matter what happened after (even then there is the question of whether aid could have saved him and whether the police et all breach a duty of care there) it’s pretty difficult to establish the knee was not casually relevant to the death.
you can see from my posting on this board I am pretty sceptical of BLM as a political movement (here in the U.K. at least) but to me this was a failure by that individual to discharge his duty which resulted in a death.
It’s not about the wider political implications it’s simply the fact the man is dead and the policeman’s approach appears on the face of it to have materially contributed to that death - it should be a manslaughter conviction.
the spicy bit would then be sentencing - you would get a riot anyway for 6 years or less but then the arguments around his training, the lawfulness of the hold etc would factor in.
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Having watched the video, I don't think it's as damning as people say. In the first half of the video, they don't kill anybody. It's only in the second half that they kill someone. So it's mixed, I would say.
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I'll defer to Crypto on this but I think you can only make sounds like that if you have sufficent breath going past the vocal chords, and that has to come from the lungs, and accordingly if he is talking reasonably normally he has enough to oxgenate his blood. I don't think yelling is just a matter of effort, without actually breathing air its just not possible.
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I'll defer to you, Cru, on the best strategy for the defence to address that point but once they have the doctor on the stand it will be hard, if not impossible to say, that Floyd's airway was compromised whilst he was talking and shouting. The audio is far from perfect but I've listened to it a few times and I'm not hearing any sounds of airway compromise. Furthermore to talk requires brain perfusion and he was clearly talking (I can’t breathe, asking for his momma – which he started doing before the knee, incidentally) meaning that not only did he have a patent airway but he had open cerebral vasculature.
Even a partisan prosecution expert would have trouble saying otherwise. Now it is quite possible that something changed (e.g. the position of knee to neck) that did result in a compromise after the 4min mark and that is what caused Floyd to become unresponsive. I’m sure that point will be raised in evidence.
From what I’ve read the defence will seek to argue that Floyd died of a “medical event” during the arrest caused by his significant natural disease (he coronary arteries were awful) and drug intoxication. If they can do this and say that Floyd died at 3 min 51 (or thereabouts) then they’re home and dry seeing as no reasonable medical expert can argue his airway (or cerebral vasculature) was compromised up until that juncture as evidence by him talking/shouting.
Once you’re into he died of “natural causes” it becomes very hard to tease out which part of the arrest (the knee, the takedown, etc) that tipped his heart over the edge.
It really is going to come down to the pathologists and other doctors on the stand and how good the respective lawyers are at cross examination.
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Fair point Spurius, good people on both sides
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"Furthermore to talk requires brain perfusion and he was clearly talking (I can’t breathe, asking for his momma – which he started doing before the knee, incidentally) meaning that not only did he have a patent airway but he had open cerebral vasculature."
I'm not a doctor but I just don't see how this can be right.
If you have a perfect chokehold you pass out very quickly. If it is imperfect (as kneeling on one side of the neck must be, in fact is designed to be) you are impeding blood flow to the brain but not entirely cutting it off.
So yes, you have some open cerebral vasculature. And yes, you will be able to speak for some time. But that doesn't mean the blood flow is not being impeded. Or that at some point your brain will be starved of oxygen to an extent that you will pass out (and then die).
Surely it doesn't need "something to change" after 5 minutes or whatever.
Put another way - if you have 25% or 50% of normal blood flow to the brain (I don't know where the right percentage would be, but) surely you will last quite a few minutes but then ultimately black out from lack of oxygen?
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When someone put me in a chokehold at school I could quite happily talk for 45 seconds to a minute. Then I passed out.
With a knee on one side you are not impeding the flow of blood so effectively so surely it would happen the same way but would take longer?
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Hard to say. The body tends to maintain cerebral perfusion at all costs including reducing blood supply to other areas (e.g. the gut). I'll also note that there was no evidence of hypoxic-ischaemic injury to the brain on the micro (https://www.hennepin.us/-/media/hennepinus/residents/public-safety/documents/floyd-autopsy-6-3-20.pdf) which suggests a fairly quick sequence of events rather than a slower developing asphysxia of the type you're describing (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6490582/ although generally it takes about 10mins of hypoxia to develop changes). There were no petichial haemorrhages which again suggests that venous return from the brain (i.e. the jugular veins) wasn't compromised.
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Crypto!
Question for you - and I'm sorry if I already asked this, but I just can't get my head around it : let's take it as a given that he had drugs in his system, but, according to the reports "Dr. Bradford w**khede Langenfeld treated Floyd and said the "more likely possibility" of Floyd's cardiac arrest was hypoxia, or lack of oxygen", isn't that the same thing as saying that the pressure on his neck caused his death? Or would "hypoxia" occur solely as a result of the drugs?
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It isn't quite the same thing but what is is saying is that he didn't think it was a direct effect of drugs on the heart. It doesn't mean it wasn't drugs acting via another mechanism or that it was pressure on the neck.
Dr. Bradford w**khede Langenfeld is an A&E guy and a bit out of his depth commenting on this TBH. He isn't trained to investigate causes of death or opine on a medically complex death like this.
I think Chauvin is pretty screwed as a result of the prade of police officers who have testified that that arrest wasn't as per protocol. Unless the defence pathologists can do an excellent job of showing that the death wasn't due to the neck compression it looks like the big house for Degsy.
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Yeah the lawfulness of the restraint argument seems to have been blown out the water - police aren’t keen to protect him here.
purely relying on the causation argument around the medical facts now which is tricky for them.
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This trial is over. As soon as the (black) police chief took the stand and said the use of force was egregious Chauvin's fate was sealed. He's going down and good job too.
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USA expert witnesses seem to have a different approach to ours. What does an ITU doctor know about causes of death? I don’t think you’d see this in the U.K.
Expert says George Floyd died from lack of oxygen https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56670912
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Prosecution appear to have conceded that the knee wasn't on the neck the whole time, but on the "neck area", including down to the shoulder blades.
Is that a chink of light for the defence?
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I see Chauvin's decided not to give evidence. Bold move as its only him who could claim that he wasn't putting that much pressure on the neck, I would have thought in the absence of that the default conclusion would be that he was. His medical experts so far seem pretty meh but have cast doubt on the cause of death (he only has to convince one jurior), maybe he thinks enough has been done to get it down to manslaughter and he doesn't want to risk messing it all up on cross and getting murder.
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Whatever the outcome there will be rioting.
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Agree with warrens analysis completely.
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There will be all the rioting. Hope Trump and the alt right have not been saving themselves for this as their comeback thing, could get really ugly.
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LOL @ some of the sh1t being posted on this thread. Quite clear this isn't a forum of criminal lawyers.
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