Pierce: The Derek Chauvin Verdict Cannot Just Be Recorded in the Law. It Must Live in the Law.
The Derek Chauvin Verdict Cannot Just Be Recorded in the Law. It Must Live in the Law.
It must be a living force in other cases. It must be a living force in the history of the law. It must be a living force that draws the ugly past and the ugly present forward into a better future.
By Charles P. Pierce
Apr 20, 2021
His eyes danced as the verdicts were read. Back and forth, quicker and quicker, his eyes danced as each of the three guilty verdicts read. His eyes danced above his blue mask because that’s what the scene is when verdicts come in during the tail end of a pandemic. And when the rituals of finding him guilty were finally done, the jury congratulated and discharged, his bail revoked and himself remanded to custody, Derek Chauvin stood up without being prompted. He put his hands behind him to be manacled without being asked. He left the courtroom with his fingertips behind him as though he were waving goodbye.
Truth be told, I did not think the prosecution would run the table, gaining a conviction on all three counts. I thought the three counts left the jury too many escape routes. Acquit on two, convict on one. Acquit on one, convict on two. I never thought he would be acquitted of all three, but I never thought the jury would find Chauvin guilty of everything, that it would reject every bit of the hackneyed sleight-of-hand trickeration tried by the defense in this trial. The crowd watching in horror was not a mob, not something to fear, unless you were killing someone. It was not down to George Floyd’s drug use. It was not his coronary disease. It was not, God help us, carbon monoxide from the car under which he’d been pinned by Derek Chauvin. George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin, an officer of the Minneapolis Police Department. Now, in the remorseless bureaucracy of the law, that simple fact has been placed in the record for all time. It exists there, but it cannot live there.
It’s not enough to record that verdict in the law, it must live in the law now. It must be a living force in other cases. It must be a living force in the history of the law. It must be a living force that draws the ugly past and the ugly present forward into a better future. After the trial, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison read off a long, sad list of Black citizens who were killed or injured by law-enforcement officers, starting with Rodney King and ending with Daunte Wright and Adam Toledo over the past two weeks. We must look at those deaths with new eyes. The verdict has to live in the memory of those horrible events until our interpretation of them rights itself, and it must live in the trials and verdicts yet to come. Or else it means nothing.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a36179712/derek-chauvin-guilty-all-three-counts-george-floyd/
= new reply since forum marked as read
It’s not enough to record that verdict in the law, it must live in the law now
Like him I thought he's be found guilty on two counts - really glad for all three.
Been playing this since I woke up
but three counts is way better
