The Supreme Court has just rejected Derek Chauvin’s appeal for a new trial in the death of George Floyd. He’s currently serving a 22-year prison sentence.
Here’s more from Fox News:
The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal from the Minnesota ex-cop Derek Chauvin, who was convicted in the Memorial Day 2020 murder of George Floyd.
Chauvin and his legal team had argued that his 2021 trial in Minneapolis was held during a time of political upheaval, and the jury was tainted by the likelihood of even more violent riots if he had been acquitted.
“This criminal trial generated the most amount of pretrial publicity in history,” Chauvin’s attorney William Morhmann said at the time of the appeal. “More concerning are the riots which occurred after George Floyd’s death (and) led the jurors to all express concerns for their safety in the event they acquitted Mr. Chauvin — safety concerns which were fully evidenced by surrounding the courthouse in barbed wire and National Guard troops during the trial and deploying the National Guard throughout Minneapolis prior to jury deliberations.”
The Minnesota Supreme Court also declined to hear the case, effectively upholding Chauvin’s conviction. The former officer is serving a sentence of more than two decades in prison.
Chauvin’s legal team has cited new evidence in a separate motion to get a new trial from the judge that presided over his trial:
Chauvin was in court last week filing a separate motion claiming that new evidence he has shows he didn’t cause Floyd’s death and that he never would have pleaded guilty in 2021 if he had known about the theories of a Kansas pathologist, whom he had been in contact with in February.
Chauvin is asking the judge who presided over his trial to throw out his civil rights conviction and order a new trial, or at least a hearing for him to present the new evidence.
According to records, Chauvin says Dr. William Schaetzel, of Topeka, Kansas, told him that he believes Floyd died from complications of a rare tumor called a paraganglioma that can cause a fatal surge of adrenaline.
It is noted that the pathologist did not examine Floyd’s body but did review autopsy reports.
In his motion, Chauvin claims that no jury would have convicted him if it had heard the pathologist’s evidence.
I’m disappointed that the Supreme Court wouldn’t give Chauvin a new hearing but I’m not entirely unsurprised. It was a very controversial case and I’ve no doubt that if the Supreme Court took it up, that controversy would rise to the surface again. Perhaps they want Chauvin to exhaust all of his options before they would consider taking it up. Or perhaps they want nothing to do with the case.
We all know that Chauvin was not guilty of murdering Floyd and certainly not deserving of the sentence that was given him. His case deserves another hearing and I truly hope he gets it.