Whither the American Rule of Law after the Disgraceful Chauvin Show Trial?

We may never repair the damage inflicted by mob rule

I wrote a piece on Ricochet entitled “If You Were Trying To Start A Race War”, which can be accessed here , in which I posed the question:

…. would you change a single thing from what the far-left of America is doing now?

That piece was published a few days before the jury handed down its verdict —in what has to be record time for a capital case, and with not a single question to the Judge for clarification— of guilty on all three counts, indicating they unanimously believed beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Chauvin caused George Floyd’s death.

Or, perhaps they had another reason, one which had more to do with jury intimidation by mob rule than the evidence in the case or the law as given to them by the Court, as they took a solemn oath to do.

I practiced law for many (many!) decades and I do not presume to speculate on any jury member’s motives for finding the way they did and I will add that the pressures placed on them must have been near-unbearable. I also cannot imagine what it must feel like to actually live in Minneapolis and see it to ravaged by the events since last May 25, although I did get a hint of it from an article this morning by a lifetime resident of that sorely beset city entitled “I’ve lived in Minneapolis my entire life. I’m leaving Friday. I no longer recognize my hometown.”

However, one cannot look at the totality of events leading up to the trial, the decisions of the Trial Judge in, among others, denying a request for a change of venue and refusing to sequester the jury, thus exposing them to the tsumani of frightening news surrounding the trial, the several issues of reasonable doubt raised by the defense (in my humble opinion), the pronouncements of leaders (?) from the President of the United States “hoping for the ‘right’ verdict”, etc. etc., and have serious doubts as to whether this man received a fair trial. It will not come as breaking news that I absolutely, positively do not feel Officer Chauvin got a fair trial and it is my deep and heartfelt hope that it is reversed on appeal. That is my hope, but this I know: there are so many reversible errors in this record, any fair judicial system would have no more trouble reversing it than the jury did in returning “swift justice” in its verdict.

My conclusion is obviously shared, explicitly or implicitly, by a number of analysts and observers whose work I have admired and respected in the past and I highly recommend these pieces be read in their entirety to get the full flavor of just how deep the concern is about the damage wrought by this verdict and the mob rule intimidation which, in part at the very least, brought it about.

One of the writers at Powerline, Scott Johnson, attended every day of the trial. He writes, in a piece entitled “How Fair Was the Derek Chauvin Trial?’:

Chauvin was repeatedly declared guilty of murder by Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Minnesota attorney general and former Nation of Islam race hustler Keith Ellison and other local authorities in press conferences broadcast statewide in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death. Walz called another press conference for the mayors of Minneapolis and St Paul to do it again as the Chauvin jury retired to deliberate on April 19.

As if this were not enough, we were afforded the invaluable contribution of Mad Maxine Waters who was airlifted into Brooklyn Center mix in response to the death of Daunte Wright. Mad Maxine demanded Chauvin’s conviction on first degree murder, a charge which the prosecutors had somehow failed to bring in the case.

The Chauvin trial took place in the Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis. The 24-story courthouse building was ringed with bricks and razor wire in advance of the trial. Soldiers and law enforcement authorities have protected the building over the past six weeks. But for the trial the building was essentially closed for security reasons. The courthouse visibly manifested the mob atmosphere underlying the case.

Any reasonable observer might question whether Derek Chauvin could receive, or did receive, a fair trial in Hennepin County. I certainly do. In his order denying Chauvin’s motion for a change of venue, Judge Cahill acknowledged the problem of pretrial publicity but deemed it irremediable by a change of venue. If Judge Cahill had the temerity to change venue to Thief River Falls in Pennington County, for example, or Madison in Lac Qui Parle County, you wonder if he wouldn’t have set off another round of riots, or whether the thought was on his mind.

In The Federalist, the title of an article on the trial tracked the feeling of so many across the Nation: “There’s No Way Americans Can Trust the Jury’s Chauvin Verdict”, and, after reviewing the events leading up to the trial, observed:

You can’t tell me all of this didn’t affect jurors’ psyche and ultimate decision. They would be superhuman or inhuman if it didn’t. Yet those endorsing mob culture and vigilante “justice” for political ends are working hard to make it impossible to express such reasonable doubts, whether in a column or as a member of a murder jury.

Jurors are always human. There is always room for miscalculation, fear, and error. In this case, however, it is extremely clear that these human weaknesses were deliberately amplified to catastrophic proportions, all because of politics.

A fair trial might indeed have come to the same conclusion for Chauvin. But we’ll never know, and never be able to trust this outcome, because America’s left purposefully made a fair trial impossible, all for political power.

They deliberately perverted justice in favor of violent mob rule to strengthen their political hand. They have done evil and called it justice. They have sown the wind, and the resulting whirlwind has still not fully hit our nation yet. But it will.

The first words I exclaimed (in addition to a few which good taste inhibits me from repeating here!) were eerily captured in another article on this travesty of justice: “This Trial Was a Disgrace”, written by a highly experienced courtroom lawyer, which sums up not only the reasons so many distrust the entire process but also the inane and stupid remarks of any number of far-left “deep thinkers of the elite”. Highly recommended reading.

When it involves the area of the criminal justice system, no one is more highly respected than Heather MacDonald, author of “The War on Cops” and a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. She just published a piece at City Journal entitled “A Troubled Rule of Law”. If you only read one piece about this sad episode in American legal history, please make it this one as it is quite simply brilliant (as are all of her writings) in its dissection of the deep and abiding damage done by this verdict and the events surrounding it. Here are a few highlights, but I urge you to read the entire piece as it is an invaluable guide to this entire issue:

America’s cities did not burn last night. But the terrified preparations in Minneapolis and elsewhere in anticipation of the George Floyd verdict—the razor wire and barricades around government buildings, the activation of the National Guard, the declaration in Minnesota of a “peacetime emergency,” the fortified police presence, the curfews, the cancellation of school, the boarded up businesses—raise serious questions about the rule of law in the United States. Had the jury failed to convict Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin on all three counts of murder and manslaughter, the ensuing riots would likely have made the conflagrations of 2020 look like a Girl Scout campfire.

This likely outcome was evident long before Congresswoman Maxine Waters encouraged such violence over the weekend. Last year’s precedent, the ensuing 12 months of wildly inaccurate rhetoric about white supremacy, and the recent looting in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, over a fatal police shooting made such rioting a virtual certainty. That inflammatory rhetoric poured forth from every institution in the country—from the presidency, Congress, corporations, law firms, banks, tech companies, academia, and the public school system. The mainstream media pounded home the narrative about unchanging black oppression. And even after the verdict, the White House (perhaps that name will be gone in another year) and the press have doubled down on the systemic racism conceit, despite the coordinated effort to convict among Minnesota’s public officials and the state’s most prestigious members of the private bar.

Going forward, it is an open question whether any police officer can receive a trial free from mob pressure, should he be prosecuted for use of lethal force.

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Yet President Joe Biden took the occasion of the conviction to recycle his favorite “white supremacy” themes from his allegedly “unifying” inaugural speech and campaign rhetoric. Floyd’s murder “ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism . . . that is a stain our nation’s soul; the knee on the neck of justice for Black Americans; the profound fear and trauma, the pain, the exhaustion that Black and brown Americans experience every single day,” Biden said from the White House. The “summer of protest” had sent the message, according to Biden: “Enough. Enough. Enough of the senseless killings.”

Biden was not referring to the senseless killing of seven-year-old Jaslyn Adams, gunned down in a Chicago McDonald’s over the weekend. He was not referring to the four dozen black children who were killed last year in their beds, front porches, back porches, at barbecues and family birthday parties, and in their parents’ cars. He was not referring to the dozens of blacks killed every day in drive-by shootings—more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined—even though blacks are only 12 percent of the nation’s population. Those thousands of black deaths get no attention from the Black Lives Matter movement and its most fervent press acolytes because the homicide perpetrators are other blacks, not the police or whites.

But, by far the most disquieting title I saw in my brief survey of opinion pieces about this verdict was: “The American Left Now Knows That Threatening to Riot Works Perfectly.” The author concludes:

While Americans were pleased to avoid another round of riots over Floyd’s death, it’s obvious that riots or the threat of them, are now a permanent feature of American life. Going forward, anytime an incident that can be framed, either fairly or not as racist, or a trial produces an unpopular verdict, or the left loses power, riots are likely.

Even if Chauvin deserved to be convicted, no one should be happy about the way the trial confirmed again that we are now living in a country where political violence is no longer considered beyond the pale.

Can you imagine a more dismal, chilling, foreboding or terrifying prospect for the future of the greatest experiment in liberty and freedom for all its citizens than these words.

I wish and pray that we did not have to come to this place but we most assuredly have.

I fear for our Beloved Nation and, most of all, for the America we are leaving the little children.