Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of all charges Tuesday in the death of George Floyd nearly a year ago. Chauvin had been charged with second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.After hearing closing arguments Monday, the 12-member jury – comprising six white people and six people who are Black or multiracial — spent about six hours discussing information from the three-week trial before coming to a decision.In their final arguments, a prosecutor accused Chauvin, who is white, of killing Floyd, an African American, by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. A defense attorney, Eric Nelson, contended that Floyd died partly from drug use and that Chauvin was following his police training in the way he arrested Floyd last May on the curb of a street in Minneapolis.Prosecutor Steve Schleicher summed up the case against Chauvin, who held down the handcuffed Floyd as Floyd lay prone on a city street and gasped — 27 times, according to videos of his arrest — that he could not breathe. “He was trapped…a knee to his neck,” Schleicher said, with Chauvin’s weight on him for nine minutes and 29 seconds. “George Floyd was not a threat to anyone,” Schleicher said. “All that was required was some compassion, and he got none.” “No crime was committed if it was an authorized use of force,” Nelson argued. “The state has not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt,” the legal standard for a conviction, the defense attorney concluded as he asked the jurors to acquit Chauvin of murder and manslaughter charges. President Biden, during a meeting with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in the Oval Office, said that he is ‘praying the verdict is the right verdict’ in the trial of former Minneapolis Police Officer Dereck Chauvin. “I’m praying the verdict is the right verdict,” Biden said during an Oval Office meeting with Latino lawmakers. “I think it’s overwhelming in my view. I wouldn’t say that unless the jury was sequestered now.”As the case nears its end, authorities in Minneapolis are bracing for possible street protests after the verdict. Many stores are boarded up to prevent a recurrence of the damage and looting that took place after Floyd’s death almost a year ago. “We cannot allow civil unrest to descend into chaos. We must protect life and property,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said Monday. “But we also must understand very clearly, if we don’t listen to those communities in pain and those people on the streets, many of whom were arrested for speaking a fundamental truth that we must change, or we will be right back here again.”Protests, some of them violent, broke out in many cities in the United States and throughout the world after Floyd’s death. The Black Lives Matter movement was at the forefront of the demonstrations, but thousands of people who had no previous connection to the Black-led protests joined in to condemn Chauvin’s actions, and more broadly, police treatment of minorities.The same issues raised by Floyd’s death came to the forefront in the community again when a now-resigned police officer in a Minneapolis suburb fatally shot a 20-year-old African American man during a traffic stop on April 11.
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