Derek Chauvin Trial: Chauvin Found Guilty of Murdering George Floyd
Mr. Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, was found guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The death of Mr. Floyd spurred the largest civil rights protests in decades.
Follow live news coverage of Derek Chauvin’s sentencing hearing.
When George Floyd was killed by the police in Minneapolis last May, the case drew comparisons to the death of Eric Garner six years earlier in New York.
The two men uttered the same dying words to the police officers forcefully restraining them: “I can’t breathe.”
But in Mr. Garner’s case, none of the officers who pinned him on a Staten Island sidewalk and placed him in a banned chokehold ever faced criminal charges. On Tuesday, Mr. Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, said she was glad to hear that Derek Chauvin had been convicted of murdering Mr. Floyd.
“I am elated because, finally, we did get some justice,” Ms. Carr said at a news conference in Manhattan after the verdict was announced in Minnesota.
A grand jury found that the officer who had placed Mr. Garner in the chokehold in July 2014 had not committed a crime. Federal prosecutors declined to bring civil rights charges. And it took the New York Police Department five years to fire the officer, Daniel Pantaleo. Only one other officer, Sergeant Kizzy Adonis, was disciplined.
Ms. Carr has spent the last six years speaking out against police misconduct. She stood beside Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in 2015 when he signed an executive order assigning a special prosecutor to investigate police killings of people who were unarmed. And she pushed for the successful repeal of a law shielding police disciplinary records. The police and city lawyers had invoked it to block her attempts to learn more about the case and the officers involved.
Ms. Carr attended Mr. Chauvin’s murder trial and watched parts of it on television, but she said some moments were too intense to watch. She said she spoke with Mr. Floyd’s family on Saturday, prayed for them and told them to expect a positive outcome.
“It was as if I was watching my son’s trial,” she said, although her son’s case never made it to court. “But watching this, this gave me a glimmer of hope.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTAbout 20 minutes before the guilty verdict in Derek Chauvin’s trial was announced in Minneapolis, a teenage girl in Columbus, Ohio, was shot and killed by the police there.
The girl, who has not been identified by officials, appears to be the latest person killed in a police encounter while much of the public attention was on Minneapolis, where Mr. Chauvin faced charges for killing George Floyd last year in a case that touched off widespread protests against police brutality.
Last Sunday, Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old motorist, was shot and killed by the police in Brooklyn Center, Minn., about 10 miles from Minneapolis.
The Columbus Division of Police did not immediately provide details about the shooting, which was confirmed on Twitter by the city’s mayor, Andrew J. Ginther, who said there was police body camera footage of the confrontation. He urged residents to keep the peace as protesters descended on the scene.
“This afternoon a young woman tragically lost her life,” Mr. Ginther said. “We do not know all of the details. There is body-worn camera footage of the incident. We are working to review it as soon as possible.”
The Columbus Dispatch reported that police had been responding to a 911 call about an attempted stabbing when the shooting took place around 4:45 p.m. in the southeastern part of Columbus.
A woman interviewed by The Dispatch identified the victim, who was Black, as her 15-year-old niece. The woman, Hazel Bryant, told the newspaper that her niece lived in a foster home and got into an altercation with someone else at the home.
Ms. Bryant said her niece had a knife, but maintained that the girl had dropped the knife before she was shot multiple times by a police officer, the newspaper reported.
By Tuesday night, a crowd of protesters had gathered outside the city’s police building, local news media reported.
Azi Paybarah contributed reporting.
The reverberations throughout the sports world came swiftly after a jury in Minnesota convicted Derek Chauvin on Tuesday of murdering George Floyd, as athletes, teams and leagues weighed in on the verdict in a case that had reignited fierce debate about racism and policing in the United States.
“ACCOUNTABILITY,” the N.B.A.’s top star, LeBron James, said in a one-word post on Twitter after Mr. Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
After Mr. Floyd’s murder last May, as well as the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and other Black victims of violence, athletes spent much of last year engaged in numerous activist efforts around issues of racial justice and voting rights.
Some hit the streets to join the protests that sprang up around the country following Mr. Floyd’s murder, even as games had been halted because of the coronavirus pandemic. Others kept their attention on Mr. Chauvin’s case and other examples of police violence as competitions resumed, with statements, public displays and other forms of protest. Soon, leagues themselves began to express corporate solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and broad themes of fighting racism and systemic inequities.
“I was going to make a celebratory tweet but then I was hit with sadness because we are celebrating something that is clear as day,” the tennis star Naomi Osaka said of the Chauvin verdict. Ms. Osaka prompted a tournament to halt play when she planned to drop out in solidarity with the Milwaukee Bucks and other athletes who did not play after Jacob Blake was shot by a police officer in Kenosha, Wis. “The fact that so many injustices occurred to make us hold our breath toward this outcome is really telling.”
Several clubs based in Minnesota expressed sympathy for Mr. Floyd’s family.
Karl-Anthony Towns, the Timberwolves star who also joined protests after Mr. Floyd’s death, said in a Twitter post; “Justice and Accountability! Things I never thought I would see. There’s much more work to do, but this is an amazing start working toward the reform this country NEEDS!”
At least one effort to respond to the verdict, that of the N.F.L.’s Las Vegas Raiders, fell flat and was met with derision and anger. The team posted an image to Twitter with the words, “I CAN BREATHE” and Tuesday’s date, a reference to some of Mr. Floyd’s last words, “I can’t breathe.”
As thousands of commenters noted, Mr. Floyd is still dead, and police officers are still killing Black people — including one, a teenage girl in Columbus, Ohio, right around the time the verdict was being read.
Late Tuesday, Mark Davis, the owner of the Raiders, told The Athletic he was responsible for the post and said the words were in reference to Floyd’s brother Philonese Floyd, who said at a news conference after the verdict that “today, we are able to breathe again.”
Davis told The Athletic, “If I offended the family, then I’m deeply, deeply disappointed.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTPeople in Minneapolis and other cities gathered in reaction to the verdict on Tuesday, describing it as a legal and symbolic victory honoring the life of George Floyd. Follow our visual coverage here.
[Follow live news coverage of Derek Chauvin’s sentence hearing.]
The Minneapolis Police Department’s initial inaccurate and misleading description of George Floyd’s death last May “might have become the official account” of what took place, had it not been for video taken by a teenage bystander, Keith Boykin, a CNN commentator, wrote on Twitter.
The video, taken by Darnella Frazier, emerged the night of Mr. Floyd’s death and drove much of the public’s understanding of what took place. Chief Medaria Arradondo of the police department testified at Mr. Chauvin’s trial that within hours of Mr. Floyd’s death he received a text from a local resident telling him about the video.
Later, Chief Arradondo, who testified as a witness for the prosecution at Mr. Chauvin’s trial, praised Ms. Frazier for her actions.
After the guilty verdict was announced Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Boykin and others on social media recirculated the police department’s initial account of events. To many, it was further reason not to place full trust in the narratives offered by police officials, and underscored the need for independent video of police actions.
“Seriously, read it again knowing what we know,” Jake Tapper, the CNN host, wrote on Twitter.
The initial news release, posted on the police department’s website, is titled “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” It said Mr. Floyd, who was not identified by name, “physically resisted officers” on the scene who had ordered him out of his vehicle. “Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress,” the release said.
The officers called for an ambulance and Mr. Floyd was taken to the Hennepin County Medical Center, where he died, it said.
Then, in a separate one-sentence paragraph, the department said, “At no time were weapons of any type used by anyone involved in this incident.”
State officials were investigating the episode and body cameras had been activated, the release said. It also noted, “No officers were injured in the incident.”
Ms. Frazier’s video helped shatter that narrative, and showed Mr. Chauvin kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s neck for several minutes.
Police officials from major cities across the country, who usually support each other especially in times of crises, welcomed the verdict against a former member of their ranks.
Commissioner Dermot Shea of the New York Police Department, by far the largest in the country, said on Twitter, “Justice has been served.” Superintendent Shaun Ferguson of the New Orleans Police Department said the verdict “is justice delivered.”
Chief Troy Finner of the Houston Police Department said, “Sometimes justice takes a little while, but it’s going to get there.” He added, “If there is anybody in the city who wants to celebrate, we are going to be there with you.” But, he said, “Do it the right way.”
In Seattle, the police department said, “Mr. Floyd’s murder was a watershed moment for this country” and added: “From that pain, though, real change has begun.”
And in Oakland, Calif., the police department called for people to be “compassionate, empathic, and forgiving.” It also said, “Together we will work towards rethinking policing in America.”
Last year, Ray Kelly, who retired in 2013 after serving 12 years as the New York City police commissioner, told The Wall Street Journal, “This is the worst act of police brutality that I’ve seen.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTFollowing the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, friends and family of George Floyd tearfully thanked the many lawyers, bystanders, jurors and protesters who they said helped to bring justice.
“Today, the tears are pure joy,” Chris Stewart, a lawyer for Mr. Floyd’s family, said at a Hilton hotel in downtown Minneapolis. “Pure joy and pure shock, because days like this don’t happen.”
Though the family celebrated the trial’s outcome, they noted that police violence against Black Americans persists, and that their fight is not over.
Philonise Floyd, one of Mr. Floyd’s younger brothers, drew a line from his brother back to Emmett Till, a Black child who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, and whom he called “the first George Floyd.” He also noted the recent fatal police shooting of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man who was killed just a few miles from the courtroom where Mr. Chauvin was on trial.
“We ought to always understand that we have to march,” he said. “We will have to do this for life. We have to protest, because it seems like this is a never-ending cycle.”
Other family members called for broader police reform and for the passage of federal legislation that would increase law enforcement accountability and eliminate discriminatory policing practices.
“We can’t bring him back,” said Tera Brown, one of Mr. Floyd’s cousins, “but we can save lives. And we want the actual reform that’s going to not only give us the change we want but make sure not another family has to suffer what we’ve suffered.”
Mr. Floyd’s brother Terrence Floyd recalled him as the person who taught him to be strong, to be respectful and to speak his mind, and said he will salute him every day.
“I will miss him, but now I know he’s in history,” he said.
Rema Miller took a celebratory puff on Tuesday outside a cigar store in Atlanta, about a block from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once served as pastor. She had followed the trial of Derek Chauvin closely, right down to the moment the jury announced that it had found the former police officer guilty of murder and manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd.
“I honestly feel some type of relief, because we’ve been carrying a lot,” said Ms. Miller, 49, a retired juvenile counselor. “As Black people, we’ve been carrying these 29, 30 deaths that have happened at the hands of police officers.”
“We’ve got this new thing, where she don’t know her Taser from her gun,” she added, referring to the recent police killing of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minn. “And you know, you’re carrying all of them, and we’re talking about it, and we felt like history was going to repeat itself. He was going to get convicted of the lesser charge. And so we’ve prepared ourselves for that.”
As she watched the trial, Ms. Miller said, she thought about her brother. If an officer had treated him like George Floyd, she said, “I know I would have been burying my brother.”
She was not the only person for whom the verdict on Tuesday felt deeply personal.
For Black people, said Eliyah Revell, 22, a security guard in Atlanta, the attack on Mr. Floyd by a white officer felt like “an attack on everybody.”
Mr. Revell, wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying an assault-style rifle, said he had been to a number of social justice protests in recent months. He knew the smell of tear gas.
“We as a Black community have seen ourselves beat down so much,” he said. “So to see a small change start, it’s the beginning of something that hopefully is going to be great. I think a lot of people will have more hope.”
In Jacksonville, Fla., Moné Holder awaited the verdict on the edge of her seat, refreshing her phone and praying. She said she had not been able to bring herself to watch the trial, or even the full video of Mr. Floyd’s death.
“My heart couldn’t take it,” she said. “I have uncles, cousins, family members, a son — that could have been them. The images that I did see are still stuck in my head.”
As she sat reading the news on Tuesday, Ms. Holder said, her son turned to her.
“He told me, ‘Oh, I remember that!’” she said. “‘A Black man died. A police officer killed him.’”
Her son is 7 years old.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting on legal issues
I keep thinking of the witnesses to George Floyd’s murder. They protested and pleaded and recorded and testified. One difficult moment of the trial for me was when Derek Chauvin’s lawyer tried to use their emotions to his client’s advantage by suggesting they made it harder for the police to do their job. The witnesses tried to help Floyd and, yes, that meant doing whatever they could think of to make the police stop. The circumstances demanded it.
Reporting from Minneapolis
This must be on the minds of everyone in Minneapolis: How much longer will thousands of National Guard troops be stationed here now that the jury has returned a guilty verdict? Protesters are winding by the courthouse chanting: "National Guard go home."
The federal civil rights investigation into the death of George Floyd will continue, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement, even though he said that “the jury in the state trial of Derek Chauvin has fulfilled its civic duty and rendered a verdict convicting him on all counts.”
[Follow live coverage of the Derek Chauvin sentence hearing.]
President Biden praised a guilty verdict in the murder trial of the former police officer Derek Chauvin, but called it a “too rare” step to deliver “basic accountability” for Black Americans who have been killed during interactions with the police.
“It was a murder in full light of day, and it ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see,” Mr. Biden said of the death of George Floyd, who died after Mr. Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, and whose death ignited nationwide protests. “For so many, it feels like it took all of that for the judicial system to deliver just basic accountability.”
Mr. Biden delivered his remarks to the nation hours after taking the unusual step of weighing in on the trial’s outcome before the jury had come back with a decision, and telling reporters that he had been “praying” for the “right verdict.”
“This can be a giant step forward in the march toward justice in America,” Mr. Biden said during his address.
Mr. Biden assumed the presidency during a national reckoning over race and has staked his political legacy around a promise to make racial equality, which includes an overhaul on policing, a central focus of his presidency. He has been outspoken about Mr. Floyd’s death, calling it a “wake up call” for the nation.
In the wake of a series of recent police-involved shootings and other violent episodes that have taken place over the course of the trial, he has repeatedly called for Congress to pass an ambitious bill on policing reform, named for Mr. Floyd and co-authored by the vice president.
On Tuesday afternoon, the White House canceled an earlier speech Mr. Biden had planned to deliver on his infrastructure plan so that he could watch the verdict come in alongside Kamala Harris, the vice president, and a group of other aides in his private dining room just off the Oval Office.
The jury’s deliberations had been closely tracked throughout the day: In the minutes before the verdict was delivered, White House aides were sprinting through the West Wing, phones in hand, and setting up a podium for Mr. Biden to deliver his remarks alongside Ms. Harris in Cross Hall. Just after the verdict was delivered the president was on the phone with members of Mr. Floyd’s family.
“We’re all so relieved,” Mr. Biden said to a group of people who included Ben Crump, the Floyd family’s attorney. “I’m anxious to see you guys, I really am. We’re gonna do a lot and we’re gonna stand until we get it done.”
WATCH: "We're all so relieved," says Biden on a phone call to George Floyd's family and their attorney after a jury convicted Derek Chauvin on all counts in Floyd's murder https://t.co/YggflhSJK3 pic.twitter.com/2LqhHZzImo
— Bloomberg (@business) April 20, 2021
Ms. Harris, who spoke before Mr. Biden gave remarks, called for the passage of the bill that would overhaul how police officers engage people in minority communities.
“Here’s the truth about racial injustice,” Ms Harris said. “It is not just a Black America problem or a people of color problem. It is a problem for every American. It is keeping us from fulfilling the promise of liberty and justice for all, and it is holding our nation back from realizing our full potential.”
Mr. Biden can trace his political success, in part, to how he responded to the nationwide protests that rose up in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s death.
Last June, as his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, stoked tensions by tweet, calling the protests a result of the “radical left” and threatening to send in the National Guard, Mr. Biden traveled to Houston with his wife, Jill, to meet with Mr. Floyd’s relatives.
The hour he spent with the Floyd family effectively created a split-screen with Mr. Trump that boosted his war chest and added momentum to his campaign.
“I won’t fan the flames of hate,” Mr. Biden said at the time. “I will seek to heal the racial wounds that have long plagued this country — not use them for political gain.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from New York
Speaking at the White House, President Biden recalled George Floyd’s daughter, Gianna Floyd, telling him, “Daddy changed the world.” He implored the nation to use this verdict as motivation to enact long-lasting change.
George Floyd had been dead only hours before the movement began. Driven by a terrifying video and word-of-mouth, people flooded the south Minneapolis intersection shortly after Memorial Day, demanding an end to police violence against Black Americans.
The moment of collective grief and anger swiftly gave way to a yearlong, nationwide deliberation on what it means to be Black in America.
First came protests, growing every day, until they turned into the largest mass protest movement in U.S. history. Nearly 170 Confederate symbols were renamed or removed from public spaces. The Black Lives Matter slogan was claimed by a nation grappling with the killing of Mr. Floyd and what that said about the country.
Over the next 11 months, calls for racial justice would touch seemingly every aspect of American life on a scale that historians say has not happened since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
On Tuesday, nearly a year later, Derek Chauvin, the white police officer charged with killing Mr. Floyd, was convicted of two counts of murder and manslaughter. The verdict brought a measure of relief and some solace to activists for racial justice who have been riveted to the courtroom drama for the past two weeks.
But for many Black Americans, real change feels elusive, particularly given how relentlessly the killing of Black men by the police has continued on, most recently of Daunte Wright just over a week ago.
There are also signs of backlash: Legislation that would reduce voting access, protect police, and effectively criminalize public protests, has sprung up in Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country.
Otis Moss III, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, said to call what has transpired over the past year a racial reckoning is not right.
“Reckoning suggests that we are truly struggling with how to reimagine everything from criminal justice to food deserts to health disparities — we are not doing that,” he said. Tuesday’s guilty verdict for Mr. Chauvin, he said, “is addressing a symptom, but we have not yet dealt with the disease.”
Moments before the verdict was announced, Derrick Johnson, president of the N.A.A.C.P., called Floyd’s death “a Selma, Alabama, moment for America.”
What happened in Selma in 1965 “with the world watching demonstrated the need for the passage of the 1965 Voting Right Act,” he said. “What we witnessed last year with the killing of George Floyd should be the catalyst for broad reform in policing in this nation.”
The entire arc of the Floyd case — from his death and the protests through the trial and conviction of Mr. Chauvin — played out against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, which further focused Americans’ attention on the nation’s racial inequities: People of color were among those hardest hit by the virus and by the economic dislocation that followed. And for many, Mr. Floyd’s death carried the weight of many racial episodes over the past decade, a list that includes the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor.
Reporting from Minneapolis
How would Americans have been watching this verdict if it weren't for the pandemic? I am here at an empty bar in the lobby of the Hilton, one of the biggest hotels in downtown Minneapolis. Not a soul or a bartender on site. TVs are carrying President Biden’s speech.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT“Such a verdict is also much too rare,” President Biden said at the White House. He called what occurred on the street last year in Minneapolis “a murder that lasts about 10 minutes in broad daylight.”
On the sidewalk in front of the county jail in downtown Portland, Ore., Cyncyrie Cruz got the long-awaited news of the Derek Chauvin verdict via a phone call from her boyfriend.
“What is it? Tell me,” she said. She started pacing.
Guilty on all three charges.
Ms. Cruz put her fist in the air and chanted George Floyd’s name. Down the road, about two dozen other people cheered on the street corner. A woman driving down the street shouted out of her car window, “We did it.”
The celebrations were echoed across the country.
“I feel elated,” said Gurpreet Singh, 46, who went to Union Square Park in New York in anticipation of the verdict. While nothing can bring Mr. Floyd back to life, Mr. Singh said, “at least this one wrong has been righted.”
A short distance away in Washington Square Park, Chris Peoples, 34, said, “Justice was served.”
And in Minneapolis, where Mr. Chauvin killed Mr. Floyd, it “felt like a weight was just lifted off the city’s shoulder,” said August Schutz, 22. “It was almost like you could hear a sigh of relief everywhere in the city.”
At the same time, one celebrant after another emphasized that this was a verdict against just one man, and that a larger struggle for racial justice and against police brutality lay ahead.
“Things have changed,” Mel Packer, 76, said amid a small but building crowd at Pittsburgh’s Freedom Corner, tearfully recalling his time hitchhiking across the segregated South in the 1960s.
But “it’s not enough,” Mr. Packer, who is white, said. “Without massive police reform, it’s not enough.”
Tifanny Burks, 28, who is Black and organized protests in South Florida last summer with the Black Lives Matter Alliance of Broward, described the verdict as “a sign, a beacon of hope that we’re heading in the right direction,” but called for much more systemic change, including defunding the police.
“My hope and my wish is that this verdict actually leads more people to abolition, to knowing that there’s another way and that we don’t have to have policing as we know it,” Ms. Burks said. “The guilty on all three charges is not going to do it.”
Tyson Joyner, a 44-year-old from Scranton, Pa., said at Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington that the verdict represented a kind of progress but was also bittersweet.
“Today we’re not as sad,” said Mr. Joyner, who is Black. “But we’re not going take this verdict and make it seem like everything is kumbaya and everything’s done.”
Reporting was contributed by Mike Baker from Portland, Ore.; Hailey Fuchs from Washington; Patricia Mazzei from Miami; Sarah Maslin Nir and Anushka Patil from New York; Bryan Pietsch from Denver; and Campbell Robertson from Pittsburgh.
Reporting from Minneapolis
Roughly 1,000 people are now marching through downtown Minneapolis chanting “Guilty!” Every time they pass an intersection, cars honk in approval.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMinnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the lead prosecutor in the state’s case against Derek Chauvin, said during a news conference on Tuesday that “this is not the end,” and that his office expects to present another case this summer.
Mr. Ellison did not elaborate on the other case, but three other officers who were with Mr. Chauvin during the arrest face aiding and abetting charges and are scheduled to be tried together in August. At George Floyd Square, a crowd chanted “One down, three to go” after the verdict was read, in reference to the other three officers.
The guilty verdict on all three counts — second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter — is a major victory for Mr. Ellison and his team, who brought 35 witnesses to the stand over three weeks of emotionally grueling testimony. The case was one of the most high-profile in decades, and their successful plea to the jury, “Believe your eyes,” has further illustrated the power of video evidence in cases of police brutality.
Mr. Ellison praised the witnesses who testified during the trial — ranging from the chief of the Minneapolis Police Department to a 9-year-old girl who witnessed the arrest — many of whom condemned Mr. Chauvin’s actions during their testimony.
“We put everything we had into this prosecution,” he said. “We presented the best case that we could, and the jury heard us, and we’re grateful for that.”
Alongside Mr. Ellison were some of the prosecutors who presented the case at trial. Matthew Frank, an assistant attorney general for Minnesota, appeared to choke back tears as he thanked George Floyd’s family. “This is for you, George Floyd, and for your family and friends,” he said.
Jerry W. Blackwell, a prosecutor who presented evidence during trial and gave the rebuttal argument against the defense on Monday, also thanked the prosecution team, saying they had the courage and passion to “get into good trouble” by taking on this case.
“They stepped into the light and they shined,” he said. “No verdict can bring George Perry Floyd back to us, but this verdict does give a message to his family that he was somebody, that his life mattered, that all of our lives matter, and that’s important.”
Chauvin received three guilty verdicts for one crime. Here’s why and what it means for his sentence.
[Follow live news coverage of the Derek Chauvin sentence hearing.]
The jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of all three counts he was facing — second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter — for the same crime: pinning George Floyd’s neck to the asphalt with his knee until he stopped breathing.
When juries can choose among different counts and instead pick “all of the above,” it raises questions of how one act can meet the definition of three separate crimes. In this case, Mr. Chauvin was found guilty of:
1) causing the death of a human being, without intent, while committing or attempting to commit an assault (second-degree murder);
2) unintentionally causing a death by committing an act that is eminently dangerous to other persons while exhibiting a depraved mind, with reckless disregard for human life (third-degree murder);
3) and creating an unreasonable risk, by consciously taking the chance of causing death or great bodily harm to someone else (manslaughter).
Neither murder charge required the jury to find that Mr. Chavin intended to kill Mr. Floyd. Nor did the manslaughter charge. So the jury could have determined a state of mind for Mr. Chauvin (the legal term of art is “mens rea”) that would cover all three charges.
The separate acts the jury had to find Mr. Chauvin committed also seem compatible with one another. To streamline the language a bit, “committing an assault” and “committing an act that is eminently dangerous to other persons” and “creating an unreasonable risk” can all go together.
In fact, “eminently dangerous” is a synonym for unreasonably risky. And both coexist easily with committing an assault.
An appeals court could disagree with this analysis and throw out one or more of the counts.
Whether that affects Mr. Chauvin’s sentence depends on how Judge Peter A. Cahill parses it. Because Mr. Chauvin has no criminal history, he would receive a 12.5-year sentence for the top charge if the judge followed Minnesota’s sentencing guidelines. The maximum charge for second-degree murder, however, is 40 years.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTEvery major broadcast and cable news network — and even ESPN — broke into regular programming on Tuesday for live coverage of the verdict, ensuring that millions of Americans watched in unison as a Minnesota jury found the former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty on all charges in the death of George Floyd.
“Justice has been served,” the CNN anchor Don Lemon declared on-air shortly after the verdict, speaking alongside footage of people celebrating — and some crying in relief — outside the Minneapolis courthouse.
Mr. Lemon continued: “I’m sure people who are watching all over this country, watching all over the world, are on their devices getting messages from people, as I am, saying: ‘Thank you, Jesus, thank God. Finally, finally — justice on all counts.’”
That sense of relief was echoed by analysts on several networks, including NBC News, where the political analyst Eugene Robinson told viewers that he had “exhaled for the first time in more than an hour” after learning of the verdict.
“One of my first thoughts was, you know, it shouldn’t have been this hard, right?” Mr. Robinson said. “We haven’t reached our destination on the racial reckoning that we need to have in this country. But I think this will be seen as a step forward, as opposed to what it potentially could have been seen as, which would have been a giant step back.”
On Fox News, the anchor Jeanine Pirro, a former New York State judge, said immediately after the jury found Mr. Chauvin guilty: “Make no mistake, the facts are solid on this verdict. This verdict will be upheld on appeal.” She took pains to frame the outcome of the trial as a sign “that the American justice system works.”
Fox News covered the news on its usual 5 p.m. talk show, “The Five,” where the co-host Juan Williams called the day “very emotional.”
“It would have been so upsetting, it would have been a kick in the stomach,” he told viewers, “if in this most extreme situation, where everybody can see what happened, if the jury had somehow said, ‘Let’s split the verdict.’”
His co-host Greg Gutfeld offered a more disjointed take, claiming it was a “myth” that the trial had divided the nation and saying he was satisfied with the verdict because it might prevent what he characterized as violent protests.
“I’m glad that he was found guilty on all charges, even if he might not be guilty of all charges,” Mr. Gutfeld said.
He was quickly interrupted by Ms. Pirro, who had been muttering in disapproving tones as Mr. Gutfeld was speaking. Ms. Pirro scolded Mr. Gutfeld for his views, saying the verdict was a result of clear facts presented by prosecutors. “That courtroom is a place where the evidence is brought in and it is pristine in the way it’s handled,” she said.
At 8 p.m., Tucker Carlson opened his highly rated Fox News show by questioning how the jury had reached its verdict and blasting the Black Lives Matter movement.
“So we must stop this current insanity,” he said. “It’s an attack on civilization. At stake is far more than the future of Derek Chauvin or the memory of George Floyd. At stake is America.” He continued: “So before we consider the details of today’s verdict, a bigger question. One we should all think about: Can we trust the way this decision was made?”
His first guest, The New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, who described President Trump as “an invincible hero” in an October column, claimed there was an “enormous amount of pressure” on the jury. As she spoke, a caption appeared onscreen: “BLATANT INTIMIDATION DURING DEREK CHAUVIN TRIAL.”
Derek Chauvin’s murder conviction on Tuesday in the killing of George Floyd brought a flood of emotion from the streets of Minneapolis to the halls of Congress, tempered with exhortations not to view the verdict as a victory against systemic racism.
The mood seemed to be summed up in a statement from former President Barack Obama: “Today, a jury did the right thing. But true justice requires much more.”
Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., spoke of Mr. Floyd’s young daughter, Gianna, and called for an end to qualified immunity, which shields police officers from lawsuits in which they are accused of violating people’s constitutional rights.
“While justice has landed Derek Chauvin behind bars for murdering George Floyd, no amount of justice will bring back Gianna’s father,” Mr. Johnson said. “The same way a reasonable police officer would never suffocate an unarmed man to death, a reasonable justice system would recognize its roots in white supremacy and end qualified immunity. Police are here to protect, not lynch.”
Karissa Lewis, national field director of the Movement for Black Lives, said in a statement that the verdict “doesn’t fix an irredeemable, racist system of policing rooted in white supremacy.”
“Minnesota police couldn’t even go the full length of the trial without taking the life of another Black person, and now we’re grieving for Daunte Wright just as we continue to grieve for George Floyd,” Ms. Lewis said. “This repeat cycle of police killings, trials and no real substantive systemic change has to stop. Now is the time for a complete reimagining of public safety in the United States, so that no more fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, children, siblings or loved ones are lost to the hands of state violence.”
Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat who is the first Black person to represent Georgia in the Senate, told reporters on Capitol Hill, “Hopefully this is the beginning of a turning point in our country, where — ” he paused for several seconds before continuing — “people who have seen this trauma over and over again will know that we have equal protection under the law.”
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus renewed their push, begun in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s death last May, for expansive federal changes to policing. Their bill, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, would make it easier to prosecute officers for wrongdoing, add new restrictions on the use of deadly force and effectively ban chokeholds. It passed the House but has languished in the Senate.
“Today I am relieved, today I exhale, but today just marks the beginning of a new phase of a long struggle to bring justice in America,” said Representative Karen Bass, Democrat of California, who is the bill’s primary author.
Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina and the author of a narrower proposal that Republicans made last year and Democrats blocked, has been quietly negotiating with Ms. Bass and other Democrats for weeks. He said on Tuesday that he was “cautiously optimistic we’ll find a path forward.”
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said that Americans “should not mistake a guilty verdict in this case as evidence that the persistent problem of police misconduct has been solved, or that the divide between law enforcement and so many of the communities they serve has been bridged,” and he said that the Senate would continue to work toward that end.
But even amid the emphasis on the verdict’s limits, Bernice King, a daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., invoked her father’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“Today it bent toward justice,” she wrote on Twitter, “thanks to the millions of people under the banner of #BlackLivesMatter standing up, speaking up and not letting up for humanity.”
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Emily Cochrane, Nicholas Fandos and Azi Paybarah contributed reporting.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMonths before the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who was convicted of killing George Floyd, millions of people around the world watched footage of Mr. Floyd’s death that had been recorded by a teenage witness.
Darnella Frazier was 17 when she recorded the cellphone video and uploaded it to Facebook in May, igniting international protests over racism and police abuse.
Ms. Frazier, now 18, was among the first witnesses called to testify by the prosecution. She said in court that she felt regret for not physically engaging the four officers at the scene, but that they were the ones ultimately at fault.
“It’s been nights I stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically interacting and not saving his life,” Ms. Frazier said. She added, seemingly referring to Mr. Chauvin, “But it’s like, it’s not what I should have done, it’s what he should have done.”
Ms. Frazier has largely stayed out of the spotlight since Mr. Floyd’s death, but she said his death has haunted her and that she has anxiety. Her voice was emotional on the stand and she cried several times during her testimony, which was off-camera.
“When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad, I look at my brothers, I look at my cousins, my uncles, because they’re all Black,” Ms. Frazier said. “I have a Black father. I have a Black brother. I have Black friends.
She added: “I look at how that could have been one of them.”
On the day of Mr. Floyd’s death, Ms. Frazier said, she had been walking to the Cup Foods convenience store with her 9-year-old cousin to get some snacks when they came upon the arrest.
“I see a man on the ground, and I see a cop kneeling down on him,” Ms. Frazier said. She described seeing Mr. Floyd “terrified, scared, begging for his life.”
Ms. Frazier said that as a crowd of bystanders yelled more loudly at the officers, Mr. Chauvin reached for his mace. “I felt in danger when he did that,” she said.
She made one of her first public comments last month, as the jury was being selected, when she wrote on Facebook and Instagram that Mr. Chauvin “deserves to go down” and wondered openly “what else got covered up if it was no evidence to see what really happened.”