Floyd Murder Trial: Confrontation with Feisty Witness Brings Chauvin’s Defense into Focus

On balance, Genevieve Hansen’s testimony was helpful to the prosecution, but not as helpful as it should have been.

T he second full day of Derek Chauvin’s murder trial in the death of George Floyd ended on a combative note.

The state’s final witness of the day, an important one, was Genevieve Hansen. She is the off-duty firefighter and extensively trained emergency medical technician (EMT) who happened upon the police encounter with Floyd on May 25, 2020, only to have to police spurn her offer to provide medical assistance. Among the most important evidence in the case is her recorded, desperate warning to Chauvin and the other three cops who were restraining Floyd that they should be checking for a pulse — which they did, and found he didn’t have one, even as Chauvin continued pressing into his neck.

But that’s what’s on the recording. As a live witness, by contrast, Hansen was a mixed bag, and the longer she testified, the more we saw her unappealing side: erratic, stubborn, opinionated, combative, and occasionally disrespectful. The trial day thus ended on a tense note, as an exasperated Judge Peter Cahill dismissed the jury for the evening and then admonished her — not for the first time — that she was not to speak over the court and the lawyers, and that she was to answer the question asked rather than make self-serving, non-responsive speeches.

Largely because of Ms. Hansen’s behavior, she had to come back Wednesday morning to finish her testimony. That ended up taking less than five minutes, as a clearly chastened Hansen went out of her way to be polite and keep her answers short and responsive.

Hansen is a trained municipal employee — her behavior on Tuesday, which bordered on contempt, cannot be sloughed off as that of someone unfamiliar with how the system works. Indeed, other witnesses in the case, for whom that description would be apt, have been demonstrably more respectful, and consequently better, more likeable, and more compelling.

Hansen’s main problem is that, just three days after Floyd’s death, she gave a witness statement to investigators that was rife with inaccurate information. She described Floyd as a small, frail man — he was tall and muscular. She had the wrong number of police on the scene. She had Floyd’s head turned in the wrong direction. She apparently got other details about his condition (such as whether he was secreting fluids) wrong. She misdescribed the position of Chauvin’s hands. And so on.

In the greater scheme of things, none of that should matter much. What happened is recorded in real time. Hansen’s relevant statements in those moments, and the fact that the police seemed to refuse to grasp that she really was an off-duty firefighter and trained EMT who could have helped in a dire situation, are undeniable. But she discounted that important testimony by her thin-skinned performance on the stand.

A lot of this is just poor investigative technique and witness preparation.

The inaccurate interview statements last year appear to have happened because investigators questioned her without walking her through the video. If a witness has participated in a recorded event, the investigator should show her the video and stop it where appropriate, asking her to explain what happened. Or, if the investigator decides not to play the recording because he wants to gauge how strong the witness’s independent recollection is, he should explain that if the witness is not sure about something and needs her recollection refreshed by viewing or hearing part of a recording, she should say so. Instead, the investigators appear to have questioned Hansen without using the recording as an aid. Whether she was traumatized or just isn’t that good at remembering things, she got many details wrong.

Then, the prosecutors compounded the investigators’ error. Hansen testified that the prosecutors offered to have her review a transcript of her prior interview, but she declined because she did not want to review it. Inexplicably, the prosecutors agreed that she didn’t need to. I don’t blame the witness for that — not much anyway. She probably realized she had said a number of things that were wrong and didn’t want to deal with it. That’s human nature, and it falls to the prosecutor to make her understand why she should deal with it.

If the failure to do that was intentional, it was really dumb. Sometimes, lawyers get too clever by half: telling a witness that, if she doesn’t review her prior statements, she can just say she can’t recall those statements — as if that is going to make inconsistencies go away. But any competent cross-examiner is then going to take her line by line through the prior statement. Because the witness is unprepared for that onslaught, she is sure to look unreliable or even dishonest. It undermines the value of her testimony.

Hansen is one of those people who is often mistaken but never in doubt — the toughest kind of personality for a litigator to prep for testimony. Once defense counsel Eric Nelson began confronting her with errors in her prior statement, she obviously realized she was unprepared and looked foolish. Clearly, saying “I did not review my statement” wasn’t going to do the trick. So, in her frustration, she started arguing with Nelson and defensively adding details that were not responsive to his questions — such as the explosive conclusion that she was angry at the time of the events in question because she had just watched the police murder Floyd. That, of course, is the central issue in the case, and one on which she is not competent to render an opinion, lacking both medical training and non-hearsay knowledge of what happened before she arrived on the scene just four minutes before the ambulance took Floyd away.

Hansen also has a service-rivalry chip on her shoulder. As a trained first responder, she perceives that the Floyd situation was botched. She has convinced herself that if 9-1-1 had been called, her fire department would have had responders on the scene within three minutes, the paramedics would have been close behind, and Floyd would have been saved. She therefore blames the police department and its dispatcher for mishandling the situation, with the result that the medics arrived too late. Hansen is emotionally invested, and self-restraint is not her strong suit, so she leaps to the conclusion that the police killed Floyd, and she wants the world to know that’s what she thinks — regardless of whether it’s admissible testimony.

As she grudgingly conceded, however, she had no idea what went on between the police and Floyd before she arrived at the tail end of the scenario. She had no idea what Floyd had done, what his medical condition was, what drugs he had ingested, and whether or how he resisted arrest. She had no idea when, prior to her arrival, the police had called for an ambulance. All she could say for sure was that she was on the scene for only about four minutes when an ambulance — that the police had called — arrived so that medics could attend to Floyd.

Furthermore, Hansen agreed on cross-examination, through gritted teeth, that many times she, as a firefighter/EMT, is not permitted to respond to a distressed person until the police — who have to deal with any crowd-control issues — have secured the scene. And many times, even if a person needs CPR, the first responders have to “load and go” — i.e., get the person in the ambulance rather than immediately start heart-compressions — because the area is unsafe and bystanders are unruly.

On balance, Hansen’s testimony was helpful to the prosecution, but not as helpful as it should have been.

Hansen’s appearance has been enlightening, though, because Chauvin’s defense is coming into focus through Nelson’s cross-examination. He is signaling to the jury that, while prosecutors are highlighting the harrowing recording of the last nine minutes and 29 seconds of the Floyd-Chauvin encounter, truly important things happened before and after that time.

The untold story, Nelson is suggesting, includes Floyd’s passing of a counterfeit bill and resistance of arrest, his ingestion of dangerous drugs despite significant underlying cardiopulmonary conditions, and problems the state will have in explaining different accounts by medical experts of the cause of death. Nelson, moreover, also plans to highlight an altercation Floyd had with police in May 2019, which bears some striking similarities to his behavior when arrested on this occasion, a year later.

In his opening statement, Eric Nelson told the jury there are two sides to every story. I’ve always thought that was a mindless old saw. In reality, I’ve been in cases where there was really only one side to the story, and other cases that were like a house of mirrors — you’d wish there were only two sides. Derek Chauvin’s defense, in any event, will have the chance to prove there’s another side to this story . . . and it will have to be a convincing one, because that recording of his treatment of George Floyd is a lot to overcome.