I wouldn’t have bet on it, but it has happened twice in the same case — once to each side in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial.
The defense case stumbled out of the box on Tuesday, and seemed significantly damaged when expert testimony about the police use of force against George Floyd became a coup for the adversary. The same thing happened to the prosecution earlier in the trial: Its use-of-force experts seemed, at times, as if they’d been called by Chauvin’s counsel, Eric Nelson. It took scintillating testimony by a medical expert, Dr. Martin Tobin, to get the state’s case back on track. And so it was on Wednesday: Reeling because its use-of-force expert turned out to be a coup for prosecutors, the defense steadied the ship, thanks to the testimony of an extraordinarily able medical doctor, forensic pathologist David Fowler.
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