The Weaponization of George Floyd

Americans have always considered a trial by jury an essential part of a free society. You don't have liberty unless you have an independent body to protect you from the abuses of an unjust court or law. 

But what if that body becomes a vehicle for political objectives rather than justice? That appears to be what happened in the wake of George Floyd's death.

According to new court documents, prosecutors felt “extreme” public pressure to bring charges against Derek Chauvin and three other Minneapolis police officers. It looks now as if it was more of a lynching than a fair trial.

Floyd died while in police custody in 2020. Chauvin, the officer who restrained Floyd by kneeling on him, was found guilty of manslaughter and murder charges. Former Minneapolis cops Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane were all also convicted in connection to Floyd's death.

But new revelations highlighted by Alpha News in hundreds of pages of sworn testimony show that Hennepin County attorneys and other county employees felt conflicted over the public's demands for retribution. The depositions, Alpha News reported, were conducted in connection with a lawsuit filed by Amy Sweasy – who was one of Hennepin County's top prosecutors – against former County Attorney Mike Freeman.

Sweasy's colleague, Senior Assistant County Attorney Patrick Lofton, told her that while he did think Chauvin could and should be charged, he had reservations about charging “the other three cops.” Loft also said there was “insane” pressure from outside the office, while Freeman harried them from the inside. County employees testified that they were shocked by how things were handled.

Lofton and Sweasy withdrew from the officers' cases in June 2020.

But there was another bombshell that dropped during the depositions. One that threatened to undermine the official, preferred narrative around Floyd's death.

Following an autopsy, Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker called Sweasy to say there “were no medical findings that showed any injury to the vital structures of Mr. Floyd's neck. There were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation.”

It is worth noting that a June 2020 memorandum indicated that Baker found a “fatal level” of fentanyl in Floyd's body at the time of his death. But that wasn't what the powers that be wanted to hear. They had already made up their minds about what happened – and so had the public – or at least so it seemed. According to Sweasy, Baker understood these realities too well.

“He said to me, ‘Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn't match up with the public narrative that everyone's already decided on?’ And then he said, 'This is the kind of case that ends careers.’”

I'm not sure it would have mattered. One of the jurors suggested as much in an exclusive interview with CNN. For the jury, it wasn't about how Floyd had died. It was the fact that Chauvin was a white man in a police uniform, and Floyd was a black man. Chauvin’s colleagues – in a bizarre case of guilt by association – shared the blame for that reason and they never had a chance at a fair trial from the outset. 

The story of Floyd's death-as-homicide fueled the most destructive riots in recent American history, which left at least 25 people dead and caused upwards of $2 billion in damages. It also gave rise to discrimination in the name of rectifying imbalances created by the specter of racism. 

The year after the Floyd riots, the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs, and 94 percent went to “people of color,” according to an exclusive analysis by Bloomberg News. That didn't happen because there was a dearth of qualified whites. It happened because of hiring practices that would under any other circumstances be considered racial discrimination.

Floyd's death and the surrounding upheaval took on the character of a divide-and-conquer color revolution, destabilizing the country by weaponizing the most infected issues in America. Part of the effects was also the collapse of the rule of law – the right to a fair trial regardless of racial and other attributes.