Jurors To Hear Arguments In Floyd Murder Trial

A prosecutor told jurors in his opening statement at Chauvin’s trial on murder charges on Monday that former Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin squeezed the life out of George Floyd when he arrested him last May.

Jerry Blackwell, a prosecutor with the Minnesota attorney general’s office, told jurors that officers who wear the Minneapolis police badge pledge to never use “unnecessary force or violence.”

He displayed a still image from a bystander’s cellphone video of Chauvin, who his white, with his knee on the neck of Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man in handcuffs, saying it showed Chauvin “grinding and crushing him until the very breath no, ladies and gentlemen the very life was squeezed out of him.”

Floyd’s death ignited a global protest movement and over the preceding two weeks of jury selection, many jurors told Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill and the lawyers on each side that they recognized the scrutiny their deliberations would come under, not least by those who view the trial as a reckoning for how Black people are policed in the United States.

The service was held in a church a few blocks east of the deadly arrest.

Philonise Floyd, a brother of George Floyd, said before the service began that he had faith that prosecutors from the Minnesota attorney general’s office would see Chauvin convicted.