Inside the Chauvin Jury Room: 11 of 12 Jurors Were Ready to Convict Right Away

[Nevilledog]

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Ron Filipkowski
@RonFilipkowski
11 of the 12 jurors immediately voted guilty as soon as deliberations began, then the one woman who voted “undecided” was convinced during deliberations. Nobody expressed any concerns about protests - it was simply an open and shut case.

“It was important for me as a Black man to be in the room,” said Brandon Mitchell, one of the 12 jurors who decided Derek Chauvin was guilty of murdering George Floyd.

Inside the Chauvin Jury Room: 11 of 12 Jurors Were Ready to Convict Right Away
One juror described the seven hours of closed-door deliberations that led to Derek Chauvin’s murder conviction.
nytimes.com
6:21 AM · Apr 30, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/us/chauvin-jury-brandon-mitchell.html


Seated at tables six feet apart in a hotel conference room, 12 jurors scribbled letters on slips of paper to indicate how they were leaning on a murder charge against Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer on trial for killing George Floyd.

When the jury foreman tallied the votes that morning, one of the jurors recalled, there were 11 papers with a “G” written on them — guilty. One paper said “U,” for unsure.

The seven women and five men spent the next few hours poring over the evidence in one of the most closely watched trials in a generation, according to Brandon Mitchell, who has been the only juror to publicly describe the deliberations last week near Minneapolis. Mr. Mitchell said the jurors watched the graphic videos of Mr. Floyd’s death, discussed the testimony of many of the witnesses and experts, and created their own timeline using markers and a whiteboard. By lunchtime, Mr. Mitchell said, the juror who had been unsure, a white woman, had made up her mind: Mr. Chauvin was guilty of all charges.

Mr. Mitchell, 31, a high school basketball coach in Minneapolis, described the deliberations in an interview on Thursday, shedding light on what had happened inside the jury room before the jurors convicted Mr. Chauvin on two murder charges and a manslaughter charge.

Mr. Mitchell said he was excited when he was chosen for the jury and glad to see that the jury was diverse; there were four Black jurors, including Mr. Mitchell, as well as six white jurors and two multiracial jurors. They ranged in age from their 20s to their 60s.

*snip*

[2naSalit]

1. That's good to know.

[crickets]

2. Absolutely. It certainly restores some of my faith in the basic goodness of everyday people. nt

[GregariousGroundhog]

3. Two of the quotes I find interesting

"The jurors decided to wait until the second day of deliberations to discuss the murder charges, but dinner did not arrive for several more hours, so they made small talk instead, chatting about their jobs and children"

and

"After several hours of discussions over a third-degree murder charge, all of the jurors said they favored a conviction, Mr. Mitchell said, and after another half an hour, they had agreed on a second-degree murder conviction as well.

Jurors decided to wait until after lunch to fill out the forms that would make their decision official, Mr. Mitchell said.

We didn’t want to rush,” he said. “We took a pause to soak it in and say, ‘This is what we’re about to do."

It sounds as though most of the deliberation happened over the span of several hours the second morning and that the evening before and the time around lunch was just spent more coming to terms with their own feelings rather than looking over evidence.