Closing summary
The murder trial currently taking place in Minneapolis of white, former police officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, last May has just adjourned for the weekend.
There had been an expectation that police chief Medaria Arradondo would testify for the prosecution today but they didn’t get to him before closing proceedings.
He will probably be put on the stand on Monday and we’ll bring you the news.
Here are the main points of today’s proceedings.
- Minneapolis police lieutenant Richard Zimmerman told the jury that it was not an acceptable use of force for Chauvin, who denies murder and manslaughter, to press his knee to the neck of a prone suspect, even if he was improvising in the situation.
- Defense attorney Eric Nelson had earlier secured Zimmerman’s assertion that an officer can improvise for the sake of his own safety is his life is under threat in a confrontation.
- Nelson also got Zimmerman to agree that the whole business of street policing had changed a lot since he was last on patrol, in 1993. He’s now a homicide investigator, plain clothes. Zimmerman admitted there weren’t body cameras and mace spray as part of the kit when he was last on the beat.
- In the most significant moments for the prosecution today, Zimmerman said that the way Chauvin knelt on George Floyd and two other officers also restrained him as he lay on his front on the street was “totally unnecessary” in his opinion.
- And Zimmerman was also asked why it would not be correct use of force for an officer to press a knee to a suspect’s neck. “If you kneel on a person’s neck, that can kill them,” Zimmerman said.
- The trial will continue on Monday. Today was Day Five of testimony. Defendant Derek Chauvin denies the charges against him of murder and manslaughter.
The trial has adjourned for the day. The police chief was not called. That means he will probably come to the stand pretty swiftly on Monday.
Minneapolis police lieutenant Richard Zimmerman just told the murder trial of Derek Chauvin that it is consistent with training for an officer to use a knee on a suspect’s shoulder when handcuffing them behind their back in a prone position.
Defense attorney Eric Nelson also pointed out that sometimes handcuffs can “pop open” after being placed incorrectly on a suspect, or could come off because they are too big for the suspect.
Zimmerman queries “too big” pointing out that, in contrast, sometimes handcuffs are incorrectly applied too tightly.
He also acknowledged that it does happen that an officer can be injured by a suspect wielding handcuffs that may have been improperly used on them.
Moments earlier, Nelson also secured Zimmerman’s agreement that, in a life or death situation, an officer is allowed to improvise to save his or her own life.
Cross-examination of Zimmerman has now finished. Prosecution will redirect.
Defense attorney Eric Nelson, who is representing defendant Derek Chauvin in his murder trial over the death of George Floyd, is cross-examining Minneapolis lieutenant Richard Zimmerman.
Under questioning, Zimmerman tells Nelson that he has not been out on regular street control since 1993 because he’s been a plain clothes investigator.
Zimmerman has previously said all officers had refresher use of force training once a year.
Zimmerman is a senior homicide investigator in the Minneapolis Police Department. He’s being led by Nelson now to admit that his training more than 30 years ago was very different from what officers get involved with today, by way of body cameras, use of mace and such.
Nelson suggests Zimmerman was more of an “old school cop”, with badge and gun as his principle tools of law enforcement.
“Yes,” Zimmerman said. He appears entirely unflappable.
Zimmerman previously told the prosecution plainly why you don’t kneel on a suspect’s neck.
#BREAKING: "It can kill 'em." Lt. Richard Zimmerman explaining that using a knee on the neck of a handcuffed person is considered a "deadly use of force."
— Court TV (@CourtTV) April 2, 2021
WATCH LIVE – MN v. #DerekChauvin https://t.co/bis122QdFc pic.twitter.com/wlRa168UR7
Updated
'Totally unnecessary'
The prosecution’s examination of Minneapolis lieutenant Richard Zimmerman is now continuing.
He tells the court he has watched numerous videos of George Floyd’s death and the use of force by former-officer Derek Chauvin and two fellow officers (also now fired) was “totally unnecessary”.
“I saw no reason why the officers thought they were in danger,” Zimmerman said.
It’s devastating. The defense is now about to cross-examine.
Updated
The murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, in the death of George Floyd last May, is now taking a 20-minute break.
Prior to the break, Lieutenant Zimmerman, who has been testifying very calmly, in a low-key voice, plainly described that it would be a violation of Minneapolis police policy to kneel on a suspect’s neck as a method of restraint, because it can so easily be deadly.
Zimmerman has been on the force for more than 30 years and has worked in drugs, sex crimes and now homicide.
Updated
'If you kneel on a person's neck, that can kill them'
Minneapolis police lieutenant Richard Zimmerman, a homicide officer, just told the court that, in response to a prosecution question, he had never been taught to push a knee into a suspect’s neck when they are handcuffed and prone, as Floyd was when he was killed.
Former officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for murdering Floyd by pressing his knee into a prone Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes when Floyd was killed last May.
Prosecutor Matthew Frank asked why that would not be an appropriate restraint position.
“If you kneel on a person’s neck, that can kill them,” Zimmerman said.
Floyd was handcuffed behind his back when Chauvin and two other officers restrained him during an arrest.
Zimmerman said there could still be a threat from a suspect when handcuffed, the officer could be kicked, for example, but he noted that it was also likely that an officer could get out of the way.
“When a person is cuffed the threat level goes way down,” he said.
Zimmerman also noted that officers were taught not to keep someone who is cuffed and on the ground on their front, because it restricts their breathing, but to turn the person on their side.
That did not happen for George Floyd.
Updated
It’s hard to say for certain, but we expect that after Minneapolis police lieutenant Richard Zimmerman finishes testifying that police chief Medaria Arradondo will be called to the stand as a witness for the prosecution.
The defense declined to cross-examine the previous witness, police sergeant Jon Edwards, so we’ll see if they choose cross of Zimmerman. It has to be noted that Zimmerman has not said anything really interesting yet...
By the time he arrived at the scene, Floyd was already dead and had been taken away in an ambulance and the police officers involved in his death, including Derek Chauvin, who is in court as the defendant, were no longer what by this time was an official crime scene.
Chauvin denies murder and manslaughter of Floyd. Testimony got underway on Monday of this week, following opening arguments, and we are now on Day Five.
The trial is expected to last another two or three weeks before the jury will retire to consider its verdict.
Updated
US president Joe Biden is addressing the public now from the White House, in the wake of the latest monthly jobs report this morning. If you would like to keep up with that, please catch our politics live blog being helmed by my colleague Joan Greve. Here.
Minneapolis police lieutenant Richard Zimmerman is describing how he arrived at the scene of where George Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020, just after 9pm local time.
The area was taped off with yellow police crime scene. Zimmerman arrived in plain clothes.
As background: Floyd died outside the Cup Foods corner store in south Minneapolis at the junction of 38th St and Chicago Avenue.
In the 10 months since Floyd’s death, the area has been preserved informally as a shrine and is known, especially to protesters, as George Floyd Square.
The future of the square is in the balance. Here’s a report on that from Amudalat Ajasa.
More than 200 people have suffered police-involved deaths in Minnesota in the last 20 years, a database compiled by the Minneapolis Star Tribune calculated. While only 7% of Minnesotans are Black they accounted for 26% of those deaths.
“That’s what people need to know is that there are hundreds of George Floyds out there in the state of Minnesota alone, that people just don’t seem to know anything about,” Toshira Garraway told the Guardian in a report we published earlier this month.
Only one Minnesota police officer has been convicted of murder – Mohamed Noor, who shot dead the Australian life coach Justine Damond after she called police saying she had witnessed an assault in 2017. Damond was white and Noor is Somali American.
“Why is it that only the white woman got true justice?” Garraway asked.
The sight of other officers not being charged or walking free over the years had “violated community trust”, she added. Noor has appealed.
For many, the statistics don’t generate confidence in the court, despite the report last month that Chauvin was initially set to admit third degree murder.
You can read the full report from Amudalat Ajasa and Jackie Renzetti, here.
Updated
Prosecutor Steve Schleicher has just finished questioning sergeant Jon Edwards.
Defense lawyer Eric Nelson is now conferring with his client, defendant Derek Chauvin, and a fellow defense lawyer. They are not going to cross-examine Edwards. The next witness has been called.
It will be Lieutenant Richard Zimmerman. He’s just been sworn in and removed his face mask. He is a middle-aged white man, wearing a suit and tie.
He’s been a police officer since 1981, he told the court. He was a sheriff’s deputy in south-east Minnesota, and then joined the Minneapolis Police Department in 1985.
Minneapolis police sergeant Jon Edwards is describing for the jury how he was called to the scene in the neighborhood in the south of the Minnesota city where George Floyd was killed last May.
When Edwards arrived, Floyd had already been taken away by ambulance, after emergency medics lifted his lifeless body from the street where defendant Derek Chauvin and two other officers had had him pinned during an arrest.
At a certain point, the vicinity became a crime scene, with the familiar yellow police tape, and Edwards helped secure the area and started talking to witnesses who had seen Floyd on the ground.
In 2018 Sgt. Jon Edwards was the appointed liaison officer for the East African Community. Now testifying as #Chauvin supervisor. Very involved in his community turning police cruisers into mobile libraries.#ChauvinTrial pic.twitter.com/cjWWktqk2G
— Justice for George Floyd (@shazza_razza) April 2, 2021
Edwards also went to talk to people working at Cup Foods, the corner store where George Floyd had gone to buy cigarettes prior to police being called because he was suspected of using what was possibly a fake $20 to pay for the smokes.
The cashier who sold Floyd the cigarettes told the court earlier this week that he was overcome by disbelief and grief after realizing that if he hadn’t accepted the bill from Floyd, the chain of events that ended in Floyd’s death could have been avoided.
You can read our report of his testimony here.
This is the first time in Minnesota history that a criminal trial is being televised live, gavel to gavel.
The judge in the case, Peter Cahill (who used to work with now-US Senator Amy Klobuchar when she was a prosecutor in Minnesota), ruled previously that there could be a live stream of proceedings.
Court TV is running a live feed of the trial and it is accessible to the public. There are only two seats provided for the media, total, in the court room itself, and a heavily-restricted media center across the street from the court house in downtown Minneapolis.
So most media, like interested public, are following the trial via live stream.
Media in the media center have screens showing a couple of additional angles in the court room.
In court, also, both the defendant, Derek Chauvin, and relatives of the victim, George Floyd, have only been allocated one seat each. Some of Floyd’s siblings have been in court.
Updated
Minneapolis police sergeant Jon Edwards is on the stand in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial. He is being questioned by prosecutor Steve Schleicher.
He is talking about encountering in the south Minneapolis neighborhood last May the officers who arrested George Floyd in addition to Chauvin: Thomas Lane, Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao.
Lane and Kueng had assisted Chauvin in physically restraining Floyd on his front on the street, by leaning on his torso, while Chauvin had Floyd pinned by a knee to the neck.
Tou Thao was standing alongside Chauvin keeping the increasingly-agitated group of bystanders at bay.
Lane, Keung and Thao are due to stand trial together in Minneapolis in August, charged with aiding and abetting the murder of George Floyd.
They deny the charges and Chauvin denies the charges for which he is currently on trial, murder in the second and third degree, and manslaughter.
Updated
In May, 2020, Minneapolis police sergeant Jon Edwards was serving in what he termed the community engagement unit.
He told the court the unit was created after the start of what he called “President Obama’s 21st Century policing initiative”, designed to increase community engagement by officers.
Barack Obama convened a panel of experts, activists, authors and academics to rethink policing in America following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
Brown, an 18-year-old Black man, was shot dead by a white police officer in the city near St Louis, sparking a huge uprising in Ferguson and a massive clampdown by heavily-militarized law enforcement using armored vehicles.
NPR reported last summer that:
The panel’s two leaders were Charles Ramsey, the former chief of police in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, and Laurie Robinson, a former U.S. assistant attorney general who is now a professor at George Mason University.
The group’s report, published in 2015, made 59 recommendations, ranging from the immediately implementable (codifying use-of-force policies, collecting data on police shootings) to bigger-picture cultural changes (diversifying police forces, shifting away from what the report describes as a “warrior” mindset to that of a “guardian”).
It was a major moment in American policing. By one count, about 40% of the nation’s largest police departments changed training and use-of-force policies in the first two years after the release of the report. Many police departments still tout their adoption of the report’s recommendations, including those in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Atlanta.
And yet, the country has arrived at this familiar moment, following another wave of highly publicized police killings of Black people. According to a database maintained by The Washington Post, the number of people shot and killed by police each year has held remarkably steady each year since 2014, at about 1,000 annually.
Asked to evaluate the results of their work, Ramsey and Robinson tell NPR’s Ari Shapiro that they believe the report did have an impact, but that changing the culture of policing in America was always going to be difficult.
Testimony is beginning on Day Five of the full trial. Up on the stand, as a prosecution witness, is Minneapolis police sergeant Jon Curtis Edwards. Do tune in to our live stream.
Edwards is wearing a suit and tie.
The trial is entering its next phase. Most of the first four days were setting out, in devastating detail, what happened on May 25 last year when police were trying to arrest George Floyd and the encounter turned deadly.
The most powerful accounts were those of bystanders, ordinary members of the public, who did not expect that day to come across a tall man pinned to the ground by three police officers, one of whom, the man on trial now, Derek Chauvin, had him restrained by kneeling on his neck.
Late yesterday, the first police officer took the stand, Chauvin’s then supervisor, Sergeant David Pleoger, who told the court said that Chauvin and other officers holding down the 46-year-old Black man should have stopped using force once Floyd stopped resisting.
“When Mr Floyd was no longer offering up any resistance to the officers they could have ended their restraint,” he said.
So we are now into the phase where police officers will talk about the extent to which, or not, Chauvin was following training and protocol when he held Floyd down by the neck.
We’re expecting the Minneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo to testify this morning, though with the proviso that it is never certain until it’s certain who will testify and in what order.
Chauvin, 45, a white man, who was fired after Floyd died, denies the charges against him - murder and manslaughter, in the death of George Floyd, 46, a Black man originally from North Carolina.
As we wait for testimony to begin today, here’s a strong piece in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune talking about George Floyd’s sister, Bridgett Floyd, and her volunteer work as the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin unfolds in all its harrowing detail.
Bridgett Floyd loaded boxes with green, red and yellow produce as sunlight beamed through the windows at the Salvation Army.
She cracked jokes. She chatted with volunteers. She evoked the memory of her older brother George Floyd on Thursday, several miles south of the courtroom where the man charged in his killing stood trial as the world watched.
“This has already taken my mind off of what is going on [in the courtroom,] and I needed that a little bit,” Bridgett Floyd said. “I needed that a little bit. It’s been a trying, trying week. And we will get through it. We will get through it.”
After traveling from her home in Fayetteville, N.C., to seek justice for her brother, Floyd took the morning off from watching the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin. Instead, she spent it giving away food at the Salvation Army food shelf on E. Lake Street.
It was the type of service George Floyd knew well: He worked as a security guard for a downtown homeless shelter run by the Salvation Army and often stopped by to visit friends and volunteer for the needy even after his job ended.
“They’re going to discredit George Floyd” during the trial, said Jacari Harris, who accompanied Bridgett Floyd to the Salvation Army. “But we want the world to remember and know that George Floyd was active in the community. He volunteered. He showed up. He would give the shirt off his back.”
Bridgett Floyd launched the George Floyd Memorial Foundation last September to carry on her brother’s legacy and promote social justice. The organization made its first $5,000 donation to the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Center last year and hired Harris as executive director. Bridgett Floyd, who is president, and Harris hope to participate in several more community events during the trial, trying to carry out the deeds they believe George Floyd would still be doing if he were alive.
“It’s been an emotional roller coaster,” Bridgett Floyd said. “I’m here to stand tall for my brother. To let everyone know that he was not the guy that officers made him to be. ... He had a family. He had a little girl that he left behind. And he left people behind that really cared about him. The community was his heart.”
You can read the full report here.
Senior police expected to testify at murder trial of Derek Chauvin over the death of George Floyd
Hello Guardian live blog readers, it is Day Five of testimony in the trial in downtown Minneapolis of the white now-ex police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with murdering George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man last May.
We are going to have a dedicated live blog on this today, with a live stream of the proceedings, separately from our daily hit blog on US political news, which Joan Greve is helming and which you can follow here.
In court in Minneapolis we’re expecting senior police officers to testify today. It’s never absolutely certain until a witness actually appears on the stand, but there is a strong likelihood that the Minneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo will testify today.
That’s a rare occurrence in a trial of a police officer, serving or former. Chauvin, 45, was fired after he pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes as he pinned him to the street during an arrest last year. He denies the murder and manslaughter charges against him.
Here’s what we expect in court today:
- Minneapolis police chief, known informally as Rondo, and police lieutenant Richard Zimmerman are expected to take the stand today as witnesses for the prosecution. We don’t know for certain and we don’t know which order they will appear in, so stay tuned.
- Court is understood to be sitting only for half a day today. The trial will get underway at 9am CT/10am ET, with testimony expected to begin around 15 to 30 minutes after that.
- Opening arguments were presented in the trial on Monday and it’s been a highly-emotionally charged week. The devastating bystander videos of Floyd’s slow death were played from the start, as well as images of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd. Much other never-before-seen footage has been shown.
- Witnesses spoke of their guilt at not being able to save Floyd.
- Floyd’s girlfriend Courteney Ross spoke powerfully about how she and Floyd became addicted to opioids after being prescribed the powerful painkillers and later turning to illicit channels. Floyd had fentanyl and meth in his system when he died, although the official autopsy concluded he was killed in a homicide by the police, he didn’t die primarily from his drug us (as the defense will argue).
- The trial is expected to last for another two or three weeks.
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