Let the End of the George Floyd Case Mark the End of a National Psychosis

T he state prosecution of the two remaining former Minneapolis police officers implicated in George Floyd’s May 2020 death is drawing to a close. One has pleaded guilty. The other will face a bench trial on stipulated facts — meaning no jury, no witnesses, and no in-court presentation of evidence.

Appeals loom, but the end of the trial-court proceedings closes an important chapter in a national nightmare. Its ramifications will be with us for a long time to come . . . including in the midterm elections just ten days away.

On Monday, J. Alexander Kueng pled guilty to manslaughter, as the result of an agreement with Minnesota state prosecutors. In the deal, the murder charge was dropped, and the parties agreed to a sentence of three and a half years. That term is to run concurrently with the three-year sentence imposed on Kueng after he and two other ex-cops, Thomas Kane and Tou Thao, were convicted by a federal jury on civil-rights charges.

As readers may recall, I believe the civil-rights convictions should be reversed because the Biden Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division essentially made up two crimes — the deprivation of a person’s supposed rights (1) “to be free from a police officer’s deliberate indifference to his serious medical needs,” and (2) to have police officers intervene in another police officer’s use of excessive force. (See, e.g., here and here.) You may think these should be federal rights and thus that the deprivation of them should be a civil-rights crime. They are not in the Constitution, however, nor has Congress enacted them into statutory law. Instead, they reflect the Biden administration’s preferred policing policies, which the Justice Department is treating as if they had the status of law. For whatever reason, the presiding judge, Paul Magnuson of the federal district court in Minnesota, waited until after the defendants were convicted to notice the “dubious constitutionality” of the prosecution’s case

The Justice Department had to concoct civil-rights crimes because there was no evidence of the theory that fueled its determination to prosecute the case: the woke-progressive story line that racial prejudice explained the police detention that resulted in Floyd’s death. To the contrary, Floyd was detained because he committed a crime and violently resisted arrest, and his vulnerability to being held in a position that police should not have applied was exacerbated by his use of illegal drugs and other medical issues.

There is, of course, no excuse for the cops’ persisting in restraining Floyd when he had stopped breathing and had no pulse. That is why the state manslaughter charges were warranted, and why a state jury validly convicted the main defendant in the case, Derek Chauvin, of murder. But the civil-rights prosecution is a different story. Kueng, who is black and was a new rookie cop at the time of the incident, has always complicated the Left’s narrative of the case as part of the supposed crusade of American police departments to hunt down young black men.

The state guilty plea means that Kueng will serve roughly the sentence that was imposed in the civil-rights case even if that conviction is eventually overturned. And in the interim, he is serving his time in federal custody, which (as we observed in connection with Chauvin’s case) is preferable for the inmate to incarceration in a state prison.

In his state jury trial, Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter. He was also found guilty of a depraved-indifference-murder charge that should not have been in the case, so his conviction on that count will undoubtedly be reversed on appeal. The other two convictions, however, are likely to stand despite significant violations of his fair-trial rights. After his state conviction, Chauvin pled guilty in the federal civil-rights case and thus waived his right to appeal those charges. He is serving his time in federal prison and was given a 21-year federal sentence that roughly equates to his 22-and-a-half-year state sentence. Ergo, if the latter were ever reversed, he would still do the time under the former.

As noted above, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao were also convicted in the federal civil-rights trial. Afterwards, Lane struck a plea agreement with state prosecutors in Minnesota. As with Kueng’s state guilty plea, in Lane’s deal the murder charge was dropped in exchange for his guilty plea to a less-serious manslaughter charge. Last month, Lane was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, to run concurrently with the sentence of two and a half years he is now serving in federal custody for the civil-rights conviction. Thus, again like Kueng, Lane will serve roughly the same sentence even if the civil-rights conviction is eventually overturned.

Lane clearly got the lightest sentence because, in a normal case without political overtones, he probably would not have been charged. Lane was another rookie cop, and he advocated that Floyd be rolled over, which would have made it easier for him to breathe. Lane’s suggestions were rebuffed by Chauvin, the senior cop on the scene.

That leaves Tou Thao as the last of the four former cops still facing state charges. His case is complicated, too, because he did not take part in holding Floyd down on the ground. Rather, Thao kept the increasingly agitated crowd at bay, mainly with his back to Floyd and the other police, during the nearly ten minutes that Floyd was being restrained. After his conviction in the civil-rights case, a 42-month federal prison sentence was imposed.

Having seen the due-process debacle that was Chauvin’s state trial, and then been convicted himself in the dubious federal civil-rights trial, Thao decided a trial before a jury marinated in prejudicial publicity — much of it generated by federal and state prosecutors and public officials — would not be in his interest. Yet, he maintains his innocence and has thus resisted pressure to plead guilty. So, he has agreed to a state bench trial before Minneapolis judge Peter Cahill (who presided over Chauvin’s trial, as well as all the state proceedings involving the other three former cops).

It will be a highly unusual trial for a criminal case. Rather than in a courtroom with live witness testimony, the presentation of evidence, and lawyer arguments, Thao’s trial will occur on paper. As the New York Times reports, the two sides will agree on a set of facts in a written stipulation that will be presented to Judge Cahill. The prosecution has agreed to proceed only on the manslaughter charge. (The Times says the prosecution “could theoretically reinstate the murder charge,” but I don’t see how Thao would agree to that, or Cahill would allow it.) On the basis of the stipulated record, Judge Cahill will decide whether Thao is guilty or not guilty, and will issue a written opinion explaining his verdict.

I would anticipate that Thao’s case will be decided in short order. This past Monday, jury selection was supposed to have begun in the state prosecution of Kueng and Thao. When Kueng agreed to a last-minute plea deal, though, that opened the door for Thao — now the lone remaining defendant — to forgo a jury trial. Since the parties were ready to go to trial, they should be in a position to present Judge Cahill with a stipulation promptly. Since the judge knows the case inside-out, he will presumably not take long to decide.

It has been a long two and a half years since George Floyd died in police custody — since he was killed in police custody, as state and federal juries have concluded. It was tragic for the Floyd family. It has been tragic for the country, catalyzing progressive Democrats to agitate for de-funding police departments and to enact pro-criminal “reforms” that have sent urban crime rates soaring. The result: surges of murder and mayhem. To be sure, inflation and the specter of recession are causing widespread anxiety. But if, as expected, voters hand Democrats a stinging defeat at the ballot box next week, the national psychosis that began on Memorial Day 2020 will also be a huge reason why.