But that doesn’t mean they’ve clinched the case.
But that doesn’t mean they’ve clinched the case.
T here are miles still to go in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial. But as this week ended with prosecutors winding down their direct case, we should be able to say one thing with confidence: The battle over causation is over. In a legal sense, George Floyd was killed by the physical restraint applied by police last Memorial Day on a Minneapolis street.
There is less in that assertion than may appear at first blush.
Causation is only one component of the prosecution. Prosecutors still have a heavy lift in establishing Chauvin’s intent if they are to convict him on either of the two murder counts, rather than the manslaughter charge (on which the evidence is already very strong). Moreover, the causation issue has always been overblown. That is mainly due to the predictable “either/or” portrayal of the case by the parties, which the media have echoed without much critical analysis.
By “either/or,” I mean the assumption that Floyd’s death has to have been caused either (1) by the unduly harsh police manner of restraint over a period of nine-and-a-half minutes, as the state contends; or (2) by Floyd’s array of medical issues — drug abuse, heart problems, significant arterial occlusion, respiratory compromise due to COVID-19, etc. — as Chauvin’s counsel, Eric Nelson, counters.
“Either/or” is simply the wrong way to look at the case.
In the criminal law, a defendant is deemed to have caused a person’s death if his actions were a substantial factor in bringing it about. For a jury to convict, there is no requirement that it find the defendant’s actions were the exclusive cause of death. If an accused’s behavior was a material contribution to the person’s demise, then the accused can be found to have caused death, even if there were other intervening or contributing factors.
Our everyday experience explains why this is the only commonsense way to look at causation, and thus why “either/or” cannot be the law. In life, our actions do not occur in a vacuum. They interact dynamically with other actions, behaviors, and other factors. One need not be versed in the Aristotelian differentiation of material, formal, efficient, and final causes to grasp this. Our actions trigger reactions — foreseeable or not — that themselves prompt other actions down the chain. It is not always possible to segregate causes, or to assign with precision the percentage contribution of each potential cause to an outcome.
Floyd’s case is a good example. The police restrained him in a way that made breathing difficult. He had underlying cardiac and pulmonary conditions, so it is a virtual certainty that these conditions were exacerbated by the police restraint, and an adrenalized feeling of desperation that itself demanded that his lungs work harder to meet his body’s oxygen needs. That is, his heart and lung conditions were not an independent cause. They were weaknesses, but they would not have killed him on May 25, 2020, absent his interactions with police. Intervening factors work in dynamic combination with initiating behaviors.
In testimony on Friday, Hennepin County medical examiner Andrew Baker, who performed the autopsy and certified Floyd’s death, described this well. Floyd suffered from “severe underlying heart disease” that included significant narrowing of aortic arteries, Dr. Baker explained. He had hypertensive disease, due to his heart’s being enlarged. These conditions tax the lungs. The duress Floyd experienced due to the “law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression,” as Baker’s autopsy report put it, were too much for Floyd in light of these underlying conditions.
On the surface, that explanation for Floyd’s cardiopulmonary arrest — the cause of death in the sense that the heart and lungs stopped functioning — seems a salient departure from the testimony of Dr. Martin Tobin. As I’ve detailed, Tobin is a renowned pulmonologist, and he concluded that even a healthy person would have died if put through the same restraint conditions Floyd endured. But for purposes of culpable causation, any deviation between Baker and Tobin is a distinction without a difference. The police actions were clearly a substantial factor in bringing about death, regardless of whether they were the sole factor or a significant contributing factor. On this point, that is all prosecutors have to establish.
Of course, Baker’s testimony could make a big difference on the essential issue of intent.
The arrest of Floyd was lawful. Before he was ever restrained in a prone position on the ground, he violently resisted arrest. Floyd may have ingested a combination of fentanyl and methamphetamine while he was resisting. Besides the use of dangerous drugs, the excitement of the resistance to arrest, even before cops restrained Floyd on the ground, would likely have caused an adrenaline rush. The cops did not know that Floyd suffered from significant heart disease, and was thus more vulnerable than the average person to the respiratory problems that can result from being maintained in a prone position — a position that is not innately dangerous, even though it can become dangerous in combination with other factors, such as a long duration of weight being pressed on the body and the anxiety that would cause as breathing became increasingly difficult.
Most significantly on the intent question, the police called for an ambulance. They made an effort to get medical attention for Floyd, notwithstanding that they failed to begin chest compressions when it was apparent that Floyd had no pulse. That failure seems inexplicable, although the defense will claim that Chauvin had a reasonable fear that Floyd could regain consciousness and start fighting again — i.e., it would have been too risky to uncuff Floyd in order to start compressions, especially with an ambulance on the way. A satisfying rationale? I don’t think so. Nevertheless, if the jurors accept Dr. Tobin’s testimony, they will conclude that Floyd was already dead. Compressions, even if police should have been administered them, would not have mattered.
Whether Derek Chauvin had the intent to apply excessive force on George Floyd, to the point of criminal assault, remains a very live disputed issue. It is no longer plausible, however, to claim that police restraint did not cause Floyd’s death. In the legal sense of causation, it surely did.