Former police judge denounces Floyd’s civil rights violation Black Lives Matter News

The federal high court indicted four former Minneapolis police officers on the death of George Floyden for civil rights violations.

A federal jury has charged four former Minneapolis police officers with violating George Floyd’s civil rights, according to three unsealed charges Friday.

Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020, when former officer Derek Chauvin held his black knee on his back for more than nine minutes. A jury Chauvin is charged with three counts of manslaughter and murder in April. Chauvin has filed an appeal and asked for a new trial.

The third indictment of the civil rights indictment says Chauvin along with the three officers who were present when Floyd was killed; Thomas Lane, Tou Thao and J Alexander Kueng “deliberately stripped” Floyd of the civil rights guaranteed by the US Constitution “without legal proceedings to deprive him of his liberty.”

A police officer has accused Chauvin of violating Floyd’s right to freedom from unjustified kidnapping and unreasonable force. Chauvin was also indicted on a second charge of arresting a 14-year-old boy in 2017 and stabbing him in the neck.

Thao and Kueng are also accused of violating Floyd’s right not to have a reasonable kidnapping because they failed to intervene to stop Chauvin from kneeling on Floyd’s neck. The four agents are accused of failing to provide medical care to Floyd.

In order to place federal charges in police-induced deaths, the prosecutor believes that an official has acted under the “color of law” or government authority and deliberately deprived someone of their constitutional rights, including without reasonable kidnapping or the right to use them. unreasonable force.

That’s a big legal standard; an officer’s accident, bad judgment, or sheer negligence are not enough to support federal charges.

Roy Austin, who prosecuted the cases as a former deputy attorney general for the Department of Civil Rights, told the Associated Press that prosecutors must prove that officials at the time were doing what they were doing wrong but did so anyway. .

Chauvin’s guilty verdict gave hope to police reform activists as they turned the page on what the U.S. saw as impunity for police killers.

Chauvin he submitted the application to hold a new trial earlier in the week, citing media interest in his trial.

Chauvin’s lawyer Eric Nelson argued at the murder trial that Chauvin had acted fairly in the situation and that Floyd had died from underlying health problems and drug use.

“The publicity here was so widespread and so damaging that it was a structural error in the storm before and during this trial,” Nelson wrote in the motion, CNN reported.