derek shobin is in solitary confinement tonight awaiting sentencing for the murder of george floyd
the former minneapolis police officer was convicted this past tuesday
after the verdict the prosecution team sat down with us including lead
prosecutor minnesota attorney general keith ellison the story will continue in a moment
when you first heard the word guilty you thought what gratitude um humility followed by a certain
sense of i'll say satisfaction it's what we were aiming for the whole time i spent 16 years as
a criminal defense lawyer so i will admit i feel a little bad for the defendant i think
he deserves to be convicted but he's a human being somehow i did not expect to hear from you
a note of compassion for derek shoven i'm not in any way wavering for my responsibility
but i hope we never forget that people who are defendants in our criminal justice system that
they're they're human beings they're people i mean george floyd was a human being
and so i'm not going to ever forget that everybody in this process is a person was there ever a time
that you thought you could lose this case i was never convinced we were going to win this case
until we heard the verdicts of guilty i remember what happened in the rodney king case when i was a
pretty young man young lawyer and i remember how devastated i felt when i heard that the
jury acquitted those officers whenever an officer is charged with an offense
particularly when the the victim is uh is a person of color it's just rare that there's
any any accountability and so there was every moment of this case i thought
what are we missing what haven't we done 57-year-old keith ellison represented minneapolis
in congress he became attorney general in 2019. in the chauvin case the governor passed over the
local county attorney in favor of ellison to give the prosecution independence ellison's team of 14
attorneys worked 11 months to explain nine minutes and 29 seconds we never thought we could play the
video and sit down we always knew we had to put on a full case and act as if we didn't
have a video we made sure that the witnesses could carry it off there were 45 witnesses
over three weeks including the minneapolis chief of police it's not part of our training and it is
certainly not part of our ethics or our values and a leading authority on the complexities
of a simple breath that's the moment the light goes out of his body which witness sealed this
case for you i think it was mr mcmillan you swear or affirmed the penalty of purging
61 year old guy didn't know george floyd and he came in there and he cried on the witness stand
charles mcmillan was among those witnesses who could plainly see the humanity that
never seemed to register in the eyes of derek chovin as you looked on the faces of the 12
jurors during the more difficult eyewitness testimony what did you see in their faces
jerry blackwell and steve slicher presented the case i saw a kind of empathy uh in their faces
that that they could feel what the witnesses felt uh they could feel the the anguish
uh they could feel the pain uh they saw the tears the dozen jurors remain anonymous socially
distanced from one another they were never seen on camera they were bright and they were taking their
responsibilities very seriously and you could see that throughout the entire trial
they were leaned forward um engaged taking notes furious yeah furiously taking notes several jurors
had advanced degrees one was a registered nurse they were overwhelmingly under the age of 40
which was unique half were white half people of color two what i would call
traditional african-americans you know people like me there were two african immigrants
there were two folks who were mixed race who had i think african descendant parent and a white parent
and then the the white jurors were very diverse too you know some of them were working class
others were very highly educated folks use your common sense the identity of the jurors is one of
two mysteries of the trial the other is the motive for the murder was this a hate crime
i wouldn't call it that because hate crimes are crimes where there's an explicit motive and
uh of bias we don't have any evidence that derek chovin factored in uh george floyd's race as he
did what he did you could have charged him with a hate crime under minnesota law and you chose not
to could have um but we only charge those crimes that we had evidence to that we could put in front
of a jury to prove if we'd had a witness that told us that derek shelvin made a racial reference
we might have charged him with a hate crime but i would have needed a witness to say that
on the stand we didn't have it so we didn't do it the whole world sees this
as a white officer killing a black man because he is black and you're telling me that there's no
evidence to support that in our society there is a social norm that killing certain kinds of people
is more tolerable than other kinds of people in order for us to stop and pay serious attention to
this case and be outraged by it it's not necessary that derek chovin has specific racial and
intent uh to harm george floyd the fact is we know that through housing patterns through employment
through wealth through a whole range of other things
so often people of color black people end up with a harsh treatment from law enforcement
and other folks doing the exact same thing just don't if an officer doesn't throw
a white neurologist in eden prairie minnesota to the ground and doesn't uh sit on top of his neck
is he doing it because this is a fellow white brother no he's doing it because he
thinks this is an important person and if i treat them badly uh somebody's gonna ask me
about this this person probably has lawyers they probably knows the governor he probably knows
he has connections i can look at the way he's dressed and the way he talks that he's probably
quote unquote somebody and so that's really what it's about why would this officer assault
george floyd well that's a question we've spent a lot of time asking ourselves
and uh all we could come up with is what we could divine from his body language and his demeanor
and what we saw is that the crowd was demanding that he get up and he was staring right back at
them defiantly you don't tell me what to do i do what i want to do you people have no control
over me i'm going to show you and what he showed them he showed to 13 video cameras could you one
conviction without the bystander video i don't know if it was just the witnesses statements
i have to say to you that it was i think it was an indispensable piece of this case the first public
statement that the minneapolis police department made hours after mr floyd was killed right
was that the police had been involved and someone had died of a medical emergency do you think we
ever would have known the truth without the video you know i have real doubts that we ever would
why would derek shoven commit murder or even assault if he knew he was being recorded i think
that um if he looks at history he has every reason to believe that he would never be held accountable
there had never been anyone in minnesota to convict any police officer convicted of second
degree murder in the history of our state so this is a precedent setting in that way so history
was on his side does george floyd bear any responsibility in your view for what happened
that day no he doesn't i'm gonna die man you need to take a seat right now if he'd gotten in the car
he'd be alive today the fact is is that police officers are paid and trained
to deal with people who are having problems and if they're allowed to use deadly force on people
who are just having a bad day then they're then we're going to be in a very very lethal situation
we need officers who have the judgment and the ability to discern what somebody is going through
so that people survive these encounters george floyd was not armed he never threatened a soul
he never struck out on against anybody he did everything the officer said except
he had claustrophobia and anxiety and couldn't bring himself to get in that car how could
shelving justify being on him three minutes after he had no pulse how can he justify not rendering
cpr how can he justify not heeding george floyd's 27 requests to be able to breathe i can't breathe
he said 27 times how can he just ignore that so i'm hard-pressed to find how george floyd
uh bears responsibility for what happened here and if you look at the totality of the circumstances
jerry blackwell and steve slicher presented the closing arguments but they're not career
prosecutors they were recruited by the attorney general from big law firms because of their talent
both volunteered to work this case for free it meant a lot to me personally i mean i i have
had my own experiences of being stopped by the police for no reason being harassed for no reason
and i want to do my part just as a citizen to say
that the rule of law matters what does this verdict change does it change anything
well we won't know right we're in the middle of history right now and so that's yet to be seen but
the rest of it is really up to the world whether it changes and what it changes to what extent
we're in the middle of this story i don't think that there are any inevitabilities in it because
we don't make progress on the wheels of inevitability in fact i think progress rose
like a brick and and so each one has to be flipped each time so when people talk about inflection
points and so on um i'm not really a subscriber to inflection points so there's no reason to believe
that things are easier going forward than they were to get here and i think we have to make
a consistent effort every day to protect the vulnerable and then to work to reform ourselves
which if we don't do there won't be any lasting change anyway if each person doesn't work to make
the change three other former officers will go on trial together in august forty-five-year-old derek
shovin will be sentenced by the judge in mid-june george floyd's family can make a statement at that
hearing and so could chobin if he chooses he faces a maximum of 40 years a maximum sentence
would send what kind of message i think it is important for the court to not go light or heavy
i don't know if it's right for a judge to send a message through a sentence
because the sentence should be tailored to the offense tailored to the circumstances of the case
look the state never wanted revenge against derek shelvin we just wanted accountability