WASHINGTON: Derek Chauvin, the US police officer whose homicide of George Floyd sparked massive racial justice protests in 2020, was stabbed in jail on Friday (Nov 24), the New York Instances reported, citing unnamed sources.
Chauvin knelt on the 46-year-old black man’s neck for greater than 9 minutes on a Minneapolis avenue regardless of the dying man’s pleas.
Floyd’s cries of “I can not breathe” had been a rallying name for demonstrators domestically and overseas who took to the streets within the killing’s aftermath.
The US Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed an assault to AFP with out naming the individual wounded.
“An incarcerated particular person was assaulted on the Federal Correctional Establishment (FCI) Tucson,” within the southwestern state of Arizona, it stated in an announcement.
“Responding workers initiated life-saving measures for one incarcerated particular person,” the assertion stated, including that the wounded particular person was despatched to a neighborhood hospital “for additional remedy and analysis”.
Chauvin survived the assault, in accordance with a New York Instances supply.
Chauvin was discovered responsible of second-degree homicide, third-degree homicide and second-degree manslaughter in 2021, and sentenced to 22-and-a-half years in jail.
The incident was caught on video – offering a drastically totally different model of occasions than the preliminary police information launch, which merely acknowledged “officers had been capable of get the suspect into handcuffs and famous he gave the impression to be struggling medical misery”.
A Justice Division probe into the Minneapolis police, the findings of which had been revealed in June 2023, stated that officers within the division routinely resorted to violent and racist practices, “together with unjustified lethal power”.
Town of Minneapolis, within the midwestern state of Minnesota, additionally settled a wrongful demise lawsuit filed by the Floyd household, agreeing to pay his kinfolk US$27 million.
2020 PROTESTS
Chauvin appealed his second-degree homicide conviction, which was rejected by the US Supreme Courtroom earlier this month.
“On the finish of the day, the entire trial, together with sentencing, was a sham,” he stated from jail in a latest documentary.
However at his sentencing listening to, he spoke little, “resulting from some extra authorized issues at hand”.
“I do wish to give my condolences to the Floyd household,” he added.
In any other case he remained expressionless, as he did through the trial, even when witnesses gave damning testimony towards him.
Chauvin’s lawyer Eric Nelson had stated his consumer “exuded a relaxed {and professional} demeanor” in his interactions with Floyd, and sought to persuade the jury that the ex-cop solely utilized a maintain that was authorised and constant together with his coaching.
However the prosecution efficiently argued that Chauvin had used extreme power – not solely with Floyd, however with others he arrested throughout his 19-year profession on the power.
Previous to the trial, the prosecution dug up a number of examples of his “modus operandi,” together with the case of Zoya Code, a younger black girl arrested by Chauvin in 2017.
“Regardless that the feminine was not bodily resisting in any method, Chauvin kneeled on her physique, utilizing his physique weight to pin her to the bottom,” the prosecution stated.
However the Floyd case was from the start a much bigger story than particular person accounts of injustice, serving to galvanise large protests, and a looking on racism and policing within the US and internationally.
The reverberations are nonetheless taking part in out within the US in the present day, with debates over racism nonetheless roiling politics and colleges.
PAPER TRAIL
After the homicide, colleagues later sketched a portrait of Chauvin as a silent, inflexible workaholic who usually patrolled the town’s tougher neighborhoods.
His dedication to the job earned him 4 medals all through his profession. However he additionally racked up 22 inner complaints and investigations, in accordance with a public file scrubbed of all particulars.
Solely one among these quite a few complaints, filed by a white girl whom he had violently pulled from her automobile in 2007 for dashing, in entrance of her crying toddler, was adopted by a letter of reprimand.
