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Legal representation for Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin has filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an appeal to the contentious and highly-publicized case concerning the death of George Floyd. Attorney William Mohrman, talked with The Daily Wire, saying his client was denied the right to a fair trial, and emphasized how the jury was biased from the outset, especially one specific juror.
Chauvin was sentenced in 2021 to over 20 years behind bars after a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s death. Videos of the arrest and of Floyd’s detainment on the ground by Chauvin went viral in 2020, sparking protests and riots across the U.S. and even Europe. Holding the trial in Minneapolis, where the incident occurred, effectively guaranteed Chauvin an unfair trial, Morhman said.
“Under the Sixth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution, every criminal defendant is guaranteed a right to a fair trial,” the attorney explained. “And part of that fair trial-right is not to be tried in a location where the jurors have either been exposed to extensive pre-trial publicity, or there has been such community outrage and the like that the jurors, before they even were impaneled before the trial, would have concluded the defendant’s guilty, or would have been pressured into rendering a guilty verdict.”
“When that happens,” Mohrman said, “the Supreme Court precedents require that the case be moved to another location or venue, as the law puts it.” However, that’s not what happened with Chauvin’s case.
“During the questioning, I would say the vast majority — not only the vast majority, probably 75 to 80 percent of the jurors — expressed concerns for their own personal safety as a result of being impaneled on the jury,” he said. “Virtually every juror had obviously heard about the case, knew about the riots, had seen the videos that were taken when George Floyd was arrested; virtually all the jurors have seen that, so it’s difficult in a case like that to impanel the jury where the jurors haven’t formed firm conclusions before the trial even starts.”
Mohrman said their “primary argument” is that “due to the riots that took place in Minneapolis, every juror who was impaneled had a stake in the outcome of the trial, because no juror would want to see their communities burned again in riots.”
“Minneapolis suffered half a billion dollars in damage, and all of the jurors, or virtually all the jurors during jury questioning, expressed concerns about another riot breaking out,” he added.
Mohrman also noted outside factors before and during the trial that could have prejudiced jury members, who were not sequestered in the sense most Americans might expect. Jurors, for example, went home each night, and then met at an undisclosed location in the morning and were brought into the courthouse with heavy security.
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