Eugene Robinson: Chauvin's despicable defense: What gave George Floyd the right to die?
The defense has rested in the trial of Derek Chauvin, after spinning a bizarro-world interpretation of events in which George Floyd somehow killed himself. This line of argument isn’t shocking or stunning, given what we’ve seen before. But trying to turn Chauvin into the real victim, by asking what gave Floyd the right to die on him like that, is despicable.
Floyd had an enlarged heart, Chauvin’s star witness, forensic pathologist David Fowler, testified Wednesday. And that implied that Floyd also had high blood pressure. And he had drugs in his system. And he was in a “stressful situation.” And, finally, his heart “went into an arrhythmia and stopped pumping blood.” The fact that Chauvin pressed his knee down on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes was apparently, in Fowler’s telling, just part of the unfortunate “situation.”
When police officers who kill African Americans actually make it to trial, there is almost always an attempt by defense lawyers to blame the dead for their own demise. No matter how trivial that alleged wrongdoing might have been, there’s always a way to suggest Black Americans escalated the situation or made it more deadly.
The most common excuse for these police killings is that the victim was somehow not “compliant” enough. This can involve a range of behaviors, from simply demanding to know the reason for the arrest to physically resisting being taken into custody. Floyd’s fatal offense, according to Chauvin’s defense team, seems to have been failing to maintain textbook-perfect cardiac health.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-all-can-see-who-the-victim-is-his-name-is-not-derek-chauvin/2021/04/15/f21cd152-9e19-11eb-9d05-ae06f4529ece_story.html
