GUILTY!!!

Judge, jury and prosecutors pleased the Black community
By Alexandra Cohen
Las Vegas Tribune

Minneapolis, Minnesota — After two days of deliberation, the jury for the former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, came back with a decision and everyone was glued to their computers, cell phones, and television sets at home or away.
It took more than two hours to learn the result of the two days of deliberation after we were informed they had reached a decision; we were kept waiting for the judge, the prosecutors (14 of them) and Attorney Eric Nelson, who represented former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to gather in the courtroom for the judge to read the verdict.
Shortly after the verdict was read, Fox News wrote: “A panel of jurors have found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty on all three charges in the May 2020 death of George Floyd, in one of the most closely watched criminal trials in recent memory.”
Chauvin, 45, was charged with second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. With Americans on edge as they awaited the jury’s verdict, the judge announced that it found him guilty.
It took the jury about 10 hours and 20 minutes to reach a decision, which was read late Tuesday afternoon in a city on edge regarding the possibility of more unrest like that which erupted last spring.
The Hennepin County Courthouse in Minneapolis was ringed with concrete barriers and razor wire, and thousands of National Guard troops and law enforcement officers were brought in ahead of the verdict. Some businesses were boarded up with plywood.
Three police officers tried unsuccessfully to place the arrestee, George Floyd, in the back seat of the police cruiser for twenty
minutes, yet Floyd was not considered agitated. And one of the fourteen prosecutors assigned to the case, Steve Schleicher, told the jury that Floyd was not resistant.
Schleicher told the jury in his closing argument that the space in the back seat of the cruiser was “too small” and it was “too tight for anyone to sit there.” It is unknown where Prosecutor Steve Schleicher has been all his life because all police cruisers in every city and every state in this country have the same type of back seat because it is not for the comfort of the arrestee, but for the security of the police officer.
In Las Vegas thirty-one years ago, three White police detectives in plainclothes entered, without permission, the apartment of a Black casino floorman who was naked while sleeping and killed that father of one; none of the detectives were arrested, prosecuted and incarcerated.
Not too long ago a Black veteran was sleeping in his car and was killed by a police officer, and again, nothing happened to the killer.
The death of Tashii Brown on the Las Vegas Strip has barely made a blip nationally — or even on the local streets.
Why George Floyd has become a celebrity with three funerals and been painted in a mural as an angel with two wings and a Halo is unknown to many people.
Why George Floyd has become an infatuation for police chief and prosecutors in Minneapolis, Minnesota is a question that many cannot answer.
Either the office of the Minneapolis Attorney General must be very wealthy or the Attorney General did not believe that his staff of attorneys were capable of handling the trial of Derek Chauvin since they had to assign fourteen attorneys to that one single trial.
It is sad to see how people show their faces expressing happiness over the verdict for a man they do not even know and whose trial they probably did not even follow.
The jurors, perhaps scared by any reprisals, voted unanimously against the former police officer whose bail was immediately revoked when he was taken into custody following the verdict and was led out of the court handcuffed, escorted by two law enforcement agents.
In the darkness of a December night, Stanley Gibson pulled his 1991 Cadillac Brougham into an apartment complex far from the Strip’s glitzy casinos and phoned his wife. The Gulf War veteran, who was battling a worsening mental condition, said he was lost, but the police shot him anyway and our Clark County District Attorney refused to press charges and the officer involved was even “promoted” to a Police Union Executive. He had much better luck than Officer Chauvin.

Follow