(C) Minnesota Reformer
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A pardon for Chauvin would be a miscarriage of justice and invite chaos • Minnesota Reformer [1]
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Date: 2025-05-22
It was just a matter of time before the prospect of President Donald Trump pardoning Minneapolis Police Department Officer Derek Chauvin for violating George Floyd’s civil rights became a reality.
When White House reporters asked him in March about pardoning Chauvin, President Trump replied, “No, I have not heard about that.”
That’s hard to believe, since right around that time Ben Shapiro led a conservative chorus of commentators and politicians raising a hue and cry on that very thing, egged on by Trump henchman Elon Musk.
As investigative reporter Radley Balko pointed out for MSNBC, Shapiro once said Chauvin should be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law” and should “go to jail” and that “everyone should be on the same side of this.”
But that was then.
Despite a trial in which nearly all the defense’s theories were heard and rejected by a jury of Chauvin’s peers, and despite Chauvin pleading guilty to his federal crimes, Shapiro and his ilk have changed their tune.
Chauvin’s conviction, Shapiro writes, “represents the defining achievement of the Woke movement in American politics. The country cannot turn the page on that dark, divisive and racist era without righting this terrible wrong.”
Terrible wrong? We all saw Chauvin impassively kneeling on Floyd’s neck while Floyd pleaded, “I can’t breathe.”
Now we can be sure Trump has heard about it, and we’re all waiting, bracing for some middle-of-the-night bathroom tweet. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is now in on it: “I strongly support Derek Chauvin being pardoned and released from prison, George Floyd died of a drug overdose.”
Yes, Floyd was on drugs. But let’s recall the words of Dr. Martin Tobin at trial. He is one of the world’s foremost pulmonologists, the man who literally wrote the book on the subject and testified in a criminal trial for the first time, refusing his usual expert witness fee. Then-Reformer reporter Deena covered his testimony:
“Basically on the left side of his lung, it was… almost to the effect as if a surgeon had gone in and removed the lung — not quite, but along those lines — so there was virtually very little opportunity for him to be able to get any air to move into the left side of his chest,” Tobin said.
“So he was going to be totally dependent on what he’d be able to do with the right side.”
But Floyd’s ability to expand his chest was also impaired on the right side, Tobin said. Floyd’s respiration rate had been 22 breaths per minute, a normal rate, which Tobin said was “extremely significant” because if fentanyl caused his respiration to go down, you’d expect it to drop to about 10.
Tobin said he could mark the moment the life went out of Floyd: 8:25:16 p.m. The officers continued to hold him down on the street for another three minutes.
In short, what killed Floyd was Chauvin’s disregard for human life.
Chauvin’s lawyers argued their client was denied a fair trial in 2021 due to pretrial publicity and concerns about violence in the event of an acquittal. True, there was plenty publicity. And there were quite reasonable concerns about violence ensuing if Chauvin walked.
None of that altered the medical examiner’s findings. He testified during the trial that his cause of death finding hadn’t changed since he filled out Floyd’s death certificate in June 2020: He blamed “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual restraint and neck compression.”
“I would still classify it as a homicide today,” he testified.
Not that the facts faze Greene or the rest of the MAGA mob presently riding to Chauvin’s rescue in the media.
You can bet they have Trump’s ear.
But think of the irony: Just about the first thing he did after taking his hand off the Bible on Inauguration Day was grant clemency to rioters for storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, handing a literal get-out-jail-free card to upwards of 1,500 charged, including 15 ring leaders and members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. This despite that roughly 140 police officers were injured during the attack, more than a dozen hospitalized.
Trump held forth: “This proclamation ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.”
Falling from the south end of a northbound bull, what the proclamation did was sign off on wanton, wholesale criminal activity. You want to know from injustice perpetrated? Ask the families, relatives and friends of those cops who were cut down doing their duty to uphold the law. For that matter, ask the injured cops about all those law breakers being let off the hook.
And in Trump’s make-believe world, the fact that Chauvin pled guilty in the federal case won’t matter.
A reminder: By pleading guilty, Chauvin agreed in open court that he “willfully depriv(ed) Mr. Floyd of his constitutional right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by a police officer, resulting in Mr. Floyd’s bodily injury and death … and acted willfully and in callous and wanton disregard of the consequences to Mr. Floyd’s life,” as the Department of Justice press release said at the time. And, Chauvin also pleaded guilty to “willfully depriving a then-14-year-old child of his constitutional right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by a police officer, resulting in the child’s bodily injury” related to a separate 2017 incident.
Federal conviction overturned, Chauvin would thankfully still be incarcerated, transferred to the Minnesota Department of Corrections to serve out the remainder of his sentence on state charges.
But let’s not forget the Minnesota Board of Pardons, which no longer requires a unanimous vote among the three members: the governor, attorney general and chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court.
If Republicans get their act together, they could conceivably win the governor and attorney general races. And then they would face intense pressure to commute Chauvin’s sentence.
Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Community Safety Commissioner Toddrick Barnette and other political and law enforcement figures are said to be bracing for the Trump pardon. This is, to say the least, prudent.
In response to Floyd’s murder, May 2020 saw days of protest — but also hell-raising — that damaged more than 1,300 buildings in Minneapolis and St. Paul and cost hundreds of millions of dollars in property destruction. Plus, payouts to victims of police brutality. And a pile of police disability claims.
A pardon would mean all the bracing in the world won’t keep all hell from breaking loose all over again.
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