The Nation Magazine, March 11, 2021
The Acquittal of Derek Chauvin Has Already Begun
The jury selection process, which started this week, shows how the cop
who killed George Floyd can, and likely will, win.
By Elie Mystal
Derek Chauvin is the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd.
I don’t have to say “allegedly” killed, because I saw it. Floyd was
alive, and then, eight minutes and 46 seconds later, he was not, and the
only intervening event that happened was Chauvin’s knee on his neck.
Chauvin’s trial started this week, and soon a jury, comprised mainly of
white people (of this we can be almost certain), will tell us whether
they think killing a Black man should be a crime. In a reasonable world,
this trial would be perfunctory. Hell, in a reasonable world, there
wouldn’t even be a trial: Chauvin would have accepted some kind of plea
deal. That’s what most people do when they are caught on camera killing
someone.
But we don’t live in a reasonable world—we live in a white one. Chauvin
is white, and he’s a cop. And his victim was Black. In most situations,
that’s all you need to get away with murder.
Chauvin’s attorneys will likely argue that something else killed Floyd
during the nearly nine minutes Chauvin was suffocating him. They will
claim that Floyd had some underlying health problem that made him more
vulnerable to vicious police brutality than the average Black man or
that something happened before the video that justified the brutality
caught on camera. They will declare that Floyd’s death was “tragic,” but
fundamentally Floyd’s fault. Somehow.
These arguments are ludicrous and should be treated as such. Floyd is
dead because he was Black, and Chauvin figured it was okay to choke a
Black person to death. But Chauvin will not be judged by anyone who
understands such basic facts. He will not be judged by me or anybody
like me. I’m not “impartial” about whether Black people should be
treated with the same basic human dignity as white people. According to
the white people who run this system, that makes me too “biased” to sit
on Chauvin’s jury.
Instead, Chauvin will be tried in front of a jury composed predominately
of white people who haven’t yet made up their minds on the whole violent
police brutality question. You know the people I’m talking about: the
“maybe all lives should matter?” folks. The people who use “urban” when
they mean “Black” and “thug” when they mean “n*****r” but can’t say it
because they’re in public. The system will trot out 12 of the
least-informed people it can find, people who didn’t even bother to
fully educate themselves on why there was a massive uprising of Black
people throughout the country all summer. And then that system will call
their judgment “justice.”
The process of stacking the jury in Chauvin’s favor started this week.
For those new to the art of jury selection, it’s a deeply flawed
process. Citizens are summoned to the courthouse, via mail, and unless
they can come up with a good excuse for why they can’t show up, they
have to appear, usually for a couple of days. If a trial starts during
that period, some of them may be randomly selected to fill out a
questionnaire. The answers to that questionnaire are given under penalty
of perjury, but people rarely check. Then, these prospective jurors are
questioned, one by one, by the attorneys in the case (and the judge if
they choose to do so). After the questioning, called the “voir dire,”
lawyers are given the option to exercise what’s called a “peremptory
challenge.” These challenges allow lawyers to strike potential jurors on
the suspicion of bias, except that lawyers don’t have to explain or
prove why they think a particular juror is unfit to serve. Lawyers can
strike jurors for any reason, or no reason at all.
Peremptory challenges give lawyers wide discretion in shaping the jury
and can be abused. Technically, for instance, you’re not allowed to
strike a juror just because of their race. But as long as the striking
lawyer can give a facially race-neutral reason, the exclusion of that
juror will stand. So, you couldn’t strike a juror for being “Black” but
you absolutely could strike a juror for listening to rap music.
The jury questionnaire for the Chauvin trial is longer than normal, and
full of questions cop lawyers can use to weed out anybody Black, without
having to say so. Look at some of the questions in the “Police Contacts”
section:
If you’ve protested against police brutality, you’re almost certainly
out. If you’ve even seen police brutality, you’re also, almost
certainly, out. If you think the police brutality you’ve heard about is
bad and should be reformed, you’re still probably out. But if you’re an
adult who buys into the false equivalency between Black Lives Matter and
the racist counter-trope, Blue Lives Matter, you’re probably in.
Only a few people have survived peremptory challenges in the Chauvin
trial thus far, and it looks like the defense is getting exactly the
kind of white people it wants. Here’s a local report about one of the
men chosen:
The man, who prosecutors said identifies as white, said he supports the
Black Lives Matter movement, but views the organization itself
unfavorably. He also has an unfavorable view of the Blue Lives Matter
movement. He said everyone should matter the same.
The whole point of that is that all lives should matter equally, and
that should include police.
This man, apparently a chemist, reportedly told the court that he works
to “find facts” and thinks “analytically,” yet he said he had never seen
the video of Floyd’s death. So, for those playing along at home, here’s
a guy who thinks he likes facts but couldn’t be bothered to learn the
facts behind why Black people all across this country were risking
Covid-19 exposure and police brutality to protest all last summer.
I’ve endeavored to learn more “facts” about the family drama of a
sclerotic monarchy, in a country I’m not even from, than this man
bothered to learn about the desperate cries of justice from people in
the nation he lives in. But he is now a juror.
In fact, his ignorance is probably why the prosecution didn’t waste one
of its peremptory challenges on him. He hasn’t seen the video. The
prosecution is counting on being able to show the jury eight minutes and
46 seconds of Chauvin’s actions, and then have that shocking footage be
enough. They’re hoping that while the defense tries to put Floyd on
trial instead of their client, that video will even convince other white
people to punish a fellow white.
Maybe it will. Maybe even Chemist Clouseau over here will have a normal
human reaction once he finally gets around to watching the video. But
prosecutors had video of Officer Betty Shelby shooting Terence Crutcher
to death on a highway in Oklahoma in 2016, while surrounded by other
police and helicopter support, and she was acquitted. They had video of
NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo choking Eric Garner to death in broad
daylight in 2014, and he wasn’t even charged. They had video of LAPD
officers beating the hell out of Rodney King. And those cops were
acquitted by a jury of their “peers.” It only takes one white person who
thinks the cops should be allowed to hunt and murder Black people to
hang a jury.
The jury system is set up by white people, and one of its primary
functions is to let white people go free when they kill Black people.
Maybe that system will fail this time, allowing justice to be done.
But I wouldn’t count on it.
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