Derek Chauvin Pleads Guilty To Federal Charges In George Floyd Death
Could extend his prison time by several years beyond the state sentence, and might allow him to serve time in federal prison.
Derek Chauvin was convicted of multiple state criminal charges in the death of George Floyd. He was sentenced to 22.5 years.
Chauvin also faced civil rights federal charges along with three other officers in Floyd’s death, as well as charges related to alleged abuse of a 14 year old during an arrest.
The federal case involving Floyd’s death was scheduled for early 2022, and a state court ruled last month that all the defendants would be tried in a single trial.
Today Chauvin pleaded guilty to the federal charges.
The NY Times reports:
A federal prosecutor said in court that the government had reached a plea deal with Mr. Chauvin under which prosecutors would seek to have him imprisoned for 25 years. That sentence would run concurrently with his state sentence, meaning it would lengthen Mr. Chauvin’s prison term by about two and a half years.
Under the proposed sentence and rules about credit for good behavior, the earliest Mr. Chauvin would be released from prison would likely be around 2042, when he would be in his mid-60s. The sentence will ultimately be up to a judge at a later hearing.
When Mr. Chauvin entered the courtroom, wearing an orange jumpsuit, he acknowledged his mother and other family members sitting in court. During the proceedings, Mr. Chauvin answered a series of questions from Judge Paul Magnuson and a prosecutor about the terms of the agreement.
Allen Slaughter, a federal prosecutor in Minnesota, asked Mr. Chauvin: “As Mr. Floyd lay on the ground, handcuffed and unresisting, you kept your knees on Mr. Floyd’s neck and body even after Mr. Floyd became unresponsive, correct?”
“Correct,” Mr. Chauvin responded. He also agreed that his actions had caused Mr. Floyd’s death.
The terms of the plea agreement call for Mr. Chauvin to serve his time in a federal prison, which is generally considered to be safer and could separate Mr. Chauvin from prisoners he may have arrested. The agreement would also prohibit Mr. Chauvin, who was fired from the Minneapolis Police Department one day after Mr. Floyd’s death, from ever working as a police officer again.
You can read the Plea Agreement.
Derek Chauvin’s signature on the guilty plea is the upper one pic.twitter.com/u8RrzGUXr5
— esme murphy (@esmemurphy) December 15, 2021
#BREAKING: "That guy's a monster." The brothers of #GeorgeFloyd react to #DerekChauvin's guilty plea.
Chauvin also plead guilty to violating a 14-year-old juvenile's civil rights in 2017.
WATCH #CourtTV LIVE – https://t.co/tnYdPcEpCs pic.twitter.com/5ydeWn1wsr
— Court TV (@CourtTV) December 15, 2021
Why would Chauvin plead guilty?
It seems he has given up fighting the state charges, where the system is against him, and if by some chance the conviction was appealed, he simply would be tried again. And again. And again.
This holds out the possibility of serving his time in federal prison, which would be better than state prison.
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I bet Chauvin is a broke and broken man who has no will left to fight a system that is going to find him guilty no matter what he does. I’m surprised in his first trial, he couldn’t find a reputable coroner to testify that Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose…. unless they were all too scared to go on record.
Anybody that’s still in police work should take note and reconsider their field of employment.
I think most have already. I know plenty of local cops who are retiring as soon as they can, and other new cops that have jumped ship to a different career while they could. Sadly there are many cops that can’t afford to lose their pensions and have to do a full 20/30 years to get it. So they’re clocking in and keeping their heads down, and I can’t blame them at all for that.
This poor guy – scapegoated in the most horrific way.
I’d trust Vladmir Putin and his KGB to run America over Biden and his Merrick Garland FBI goons. At least we know where Putin stands. And he’s competent.
Putin also loves his country and people.
I heard he also loves bearskin rugs.
We’ve really crossed the Rubicon. We’re not going to surive 3 years more of this.
They didn’t need more evidence, the evidence in the first trial seemed to be enough for acquittal.
But the jury decided as it did, in Chauvin’s case and also the jury in the Arbery cases. This is the public mood. It’s not safe to be in these interactions; the jury will see the colors involved and that’s most of the way to a verdict. I cannot understand it, but the data are clear.
Our medical establishment has sold out on all levels, they sold out on Saint George
We are all expendable to “them”
The conclusion to leftism is genocide. Always genocide. There’s never been one exception.
This is so, so, so sad—for Chauvin and for America.
Too bad an agreement could not be reached tying the resolution of the federal charges to the outcome of the of his appeal.
People should understand that false allocutions are absolutely normal and routine. Prosecutors and judges both know this very well, to the point where I sometimes wonder whether there is a single prosecutor out there who has not at some point knowingly suborned perjury, or a judge who has not knowingly colluded in suborning perjury.
This is the fate that awaits Kim Potter. For her, the dynamic is going to be different because it’s looking increasingly likely she’s going to be acquitted. I suspect that if Potter is found not-guilty, she’ll be arrested by FBI the moment the trial adjourns.
If you’re still a cop after all of this, you probably aren’t paying attention.
How? What could the feds charge her with? Even if she’s actually guilty of manslaughter, that can’t be a civil rights violation, because by definition it’s not motivated by anything at all, let alone the victims’ race.
Really? You fail to understand that narrative trumps truth for progressive prosecutors?
Couldn’t the same be said about Chauvin?
No. Chauvin could be guilty of civil rights violations. Even if he was not motivated by race, on the prosecution’s account his continuing to restrain Floyd after he’d stopped actively resisting arrest violated his civil rights. So while Chauvin’s allocution should not be automatically assumed to be true, it’s at least possible. And he’s now agreed to be punished as if it were true, either because it is, or because he decided the deal he was offered was better than the alternative. As I wrote below, people make that kind of decision all the time, and therefore make perjured allocutions with the full approval of the prosecutor and the judge.
But in Potter’s case, what possible civil rights charge could there be? How is it possible to squeeze the facts into a civil rights charge?
Plus, of course, if the state jury acquits her why would she agree to a deal on federal charges? Why wouldn’t she bet that a federal jury drawn from the same venire, and presented with the same evidence, would reach the same conclusion?
Ahh, TY
what possible civil rights charge could there be? How is it possible to squeeze the facts into a civil rights charge
You know that in general I agree with you on what the law actually says, but we’re increasingly seeing in these kinds of cases that it doesn’t matter what the law says. There’s a political power play happening and far, far too many judges and DAs have bought into it, to the point that the plain text of the law is irrelevant.
There are parallels to the SRA hysteria in the 1980s here.
Satanic Ritual Abuse? Yes, there are still morons who believe in that; nowadays they’re known as Q-anon…
If that mattered as much as it should, Chauvin and the Arbery defendants would be free men today.
No, they wouldn’t. The civil rights case against both Chauvin and the Arbery defendants is plausible, even if it’s not true. The evidence is consistent with their being guilty; a prosecutor can spin a story from them that makes them guilty. Even if it’s not enough to convince a jury, at least it gets the prosecution inside the courthouse door. In Potter’s case there’s nothing there. There’s no case to be made. As we’re seeing now, the state is struggling just to make out a regular manslaughter case against her; there’s nothing to spin into a civil rights case. Even Rumpelstiltskin needed straw to weave into gold; he couldn’t do it with thin air.
Not true. The civil rights cases only apply to government employees. They could charge Chauvin and Potter, but there is no basis on which to charge the Arbery defendants. Civil rights law does not apply like that
Yes, it does apply exactly like that. Depriving someone of their civil rights is a federal crime even if it’s not under color of law.
Lemrick Nelson’s conviction was for depriving my friend Yankel Rosenbaum of his right to walk on the public streets, which depended on the pretense that had he only been on private property those animals would have left him alone. However congress has since amended the law so that even that pretense is not necessary; under today’s law he’d have been convicted even had Yankel been on private property.
Come on, Milhouse. The Feds ALWAYS can find a way to put you in jail.
Not while we still have juries and appeals courts.
The dawning of a new religion- The crucifix will be supplanted by the image of a police boot on a neck. The miracle of the loaves and fishes will become the crank and horse.
…with George Fentaloyd as our new messiah.
He is, at the least, fentanyl salesman of the year.
Cops need to get out of city shit holes, and in some cases whole stares should be shunned. This crap makes my blood boil.
states
I really feel sorry for Chauvin – have all along – what they did to him was a lynching but I just have to say it. The guy is an idiot. Why would he plead guilty? The plea “deal” is for 25 years more than he got on the state murder charges.
Was there ever a good Federal case against him? Other than the fact he is white what legal basis did the Bolshevik AG Merrick Garland have for charging him?
Chauvin had many great grounds to appeal the murder conviction but that is lost now.
If he is not going to fight for his life he might as well commit suicide at this point. At least he will get to chose the time and manner of his death. If black inmates get to him he will be tortured to death (and of course a black inmate could murder him with impunity) .
Such a sad situation. I don’t know why no one rallied to his support. Where were all the police fraternities? Why didn’t they raise money for a good defense? Don’t understand any of this.
Andrew said he think at least this way he will get to serve in a better prison but doesn’t he have to serve his first 22 years in state prison and then the final years in Federal prison? He won’t be alive by then .
.
He just may.
“The plea “deal” is for 25 years more than he got on the state murder charges”
I meant to write “that is more than he got on the state murder charges (22.5 years) .
First of all, he didn’t agree to 25 years; he agreed to between 20 and 25; the state will argue for 25 and he will argue for 20. We don’t know what the judge will give him.
Second, the deal is that he serves the whole thing in federal prison. As soon as he’s sentenced, he’s out of state prison.
Third, he can still appeal the state conviction, though I don’t see what point there would be.
Fourth, we know nothing about this other charge that he got dismissed as part of the deal. Maybe he was looking at a sure conviction on that one, whatever it was.
No, one of the early stories said these agreements include him not appealing state charges.
Nope. No such clause is mentioned in the agreement filed with the court. He agrees not to appeal the federal conviction or sentence (except for ineffective assistance of counsel, which he can’t waive). He can still appeal the state conviction.
What would appealing the state conviction get him now? He would just be sent to a Federal prison to spend the rest of his remaining life. Agreeing to plead guilty to the trumped up Federal charges make absolutely no sense to me.
That’s why I wrote that I don’t see the point. But he can still appeal.
It’s my understanding, although I have no direct knowledge, that a fed pen, although not pleasant, is generally preferable to a state pen, especially for someone like Chauvin.
It’s not 25 years more. It’s concurrent. It could be no more, or somewhat more.
I gather it will take both a presidential and a governor’s pardon to spring him. It seems like he is screwed royal. This is a gross injustice. Police need to get the hell out of liberal cities and states.
If found guilty in federal court the judge may give him a 25 year sentence and order it to run consecutively and make it an effective life sentence — something the feds do a lot. He probably figures his odds in both federal and MN appeals courts are very low (he has to win both or it’s all for nothing) so his best bet is to get out in his mid 60s and have a few years left on the outside.
Federal time? It sounds like he my have cut a deal to get sent to one of the Club Fed prisons.
If they want any city cops left in this country, I would advise the Feds to do just that.
Not good enough, cops should still bail.
I wouldn’t bail. I’d just be very selective about how I do my job. It would make it much easier, and I’d still draw a paycheck.
Maybe the Feds will promise to keep him out of general population. Minnesota very likely wants him assassinated in the first year.
General population would probably be generally supportive. From what I’ve heard, all third-hand, they seem to have a conventional 1950’s morality. Diddling kids is not OK. Doing police work in the totality of circumstances is.
There are more than a few BLM supporters in gen pop, I would venture to guess. Some as mentally ill as Darrell Brooks and without a helping District Attorney to let him kill an unarmed racial group on the outside rather than the inside.
I find it interesting that among the things Chauvin admitted to in his agreement was that hitting someone in the head with a flashlight constitutes deadly force. I wonder how the Rittenhouse prosecutors would feel about that.
It’s not like he had a choice. He also admitted to killing George Floyd, that his actions were unlawful and that he *knew* they were unlawful. He also admits that he knew that Floyd was pulseless. In the bodycam video, Chauvin says “huh” in response to Keung when Kueng tells Chauvin that Floyd is pulseless. There is evidence that Chauvin did not hear Keung, yet here is signing away that he did.
This plea deal involves outlining why you were guilty. I can’t imagine what Chauvin was thinking, not only believing that he didn’t do anything wrong, or intentionally kill someone, having being forced to serve time in prison and sign away his life on a set of lies that he doesn’t really have a choice in signing. The alternative is risk life in prison because you’re broke and out of resources to possibly fight those charges.
I feel so sorry for this man. He is getting more time in prison than some murderers, rapists, and pedophiles. Insane. And this is where the use of force is highly contested, and the substantial causal factor of death does not even point to Chauvin.
Um, none of that has got anything to do with the flashlight.
He admitted whatever they put in front of him. That’s how plea deals work. They write, you sign, you swear it’s true and you repeat whatever lies they tell you to.
My point is that this is one of the things the federal prosecutor made him admit to. The federal prosecutor who works for the president. Which ought, by collateral estoppel, to mean that no federal prosecutor anywhere can now make the kind of arguments the Wisconsin prosecutor made against Rittenhouse.
Everybody takes a beating, sometimes.
In some semblance of evenness, has a person of color ever been prosecuted (persecuted) for a civil rights violation?
Yes, it happens all the time.
One example (among many) is Lemrick Nelson.
It seems he had the opposite luck to Chauvin in his murder trial. Clearly guilty, but acquitted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemrick_Nelson.
As I say in another comment, this isn’t about government corruption only. (But at the link it says incriminating evidence was omitted from the prosecution — why?)
It’s about juries. You can’t seem to get a jury to convict in black-on-white charges, or to get them to acquit in white-on-black charges, no matter the evidence.
So my conclusion is that the system is unsafe and cannot be fixed, because it’s the system a weird majority seems to want. It’s the image of America. I don’t understand it as one who was born and has lived here, but I accept it as the spirit of the place and am wary of it.
He’s just the one example I can cite easily. But the point is that the civil rights laws are routinely used against black criminals whenever they violate them, which is often. Just look up FBI stats on “hate crimes”, by race of perpetrator. The result is not something your average woke and ignorant pajama boy activist would ever imagine. Very few rednecks, very many black thugs.
Not persecuted, though. Just prosecuted.
He was only ever guilty of manslaughter in my mind for not allowing him to receive medical attention. It was Fentanyl that killed him not a knee on the hard part of the neck and on his upper back.
He didn’t stop him from getting medical attention. EMS came asap
No, they didn’t. They took their own damn sweet time, and that was a major factor in the outcome.
What “sweet time” are you referring to? Scene was not safe to render aid, hence why EMS did a load and go. It was 1:50 before Keung said he did not have a pulse to Chauvin until EMS arrived.
Police officers are not doctors nor do they have a duty to render aid if the scene is not safe. Also, they would have needed to remove the cuffs in order to chest compressions. Rolling Floyd over to the side recovery position would not have saved him by all available evidence, and rolling someone into the recovery is only done when feasible, not when someone is actively resisting. It was about 3 or so minutes when Floyd stopped actively resisting when he was rendered unconscious.
So yes, to the jury, not rendering aid probably played into their decision to convict because they considered Chauvin’s character even if not applicable in the jury instructions. CNN did an interview with the jury, and in that interview, one of the jurors said it was Chauvin’s inaction that spoke louder than his action, citing the fact that he was tapped on the shoulder and told to get off of Floyd. In reality, he was restraining Floyd because Floyd demonstrated himself to be a threat.
Also, you need to make up your mind. Dr. Baker said Floyd died much later than what the state alleged. He does not believe Floyd died on scene, whereas Dr. Tobin AND Dr. Rich said Floyd died at the scene, and even pointed out the last moments of Floyd’s life. Of course, rendering aid didn’t matter than.
So which is it? When did Floyd die? Or do you just move the goal posts when confronted on these sort of matters when one points out the inconsistencies in the state arguments?
The Devil, or the deep, blue sea?
The Government has unlimited funding to prosecute you.
How can you fight that? With your retirement savings???
Chauvin plead guilty to:
“[he] willfully deprived George Perry Floyd, Jr., of his constitutional rights-specifically, the right to be free from an unreasonable seizure, which includes the right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by a police office”
What is the “unreasonable seizure”? Everything about Floyd’s arrest was completely legal and by-the-book.
What is the “unreasonable force”? Chauvin was restraining Floyd in the exact manner THAT HE WAS TRAINED TO DO WHEN DEALING WITH CASES OF EXCITED DELERIUM! The MPLS police training manual actually shows the neck restraint being used. U.S. police forces are trained in Israel in how to use the neck restraint. If this restraint constitutes “unreasonable force” how come Chauvin was taught to use it?
For the sake of argument lets say that Chauvin’s actions did contribute (unintentionally) to Floyds death. SO WHAT! It was Floyd who decided to get into a fight with three cops after downing fentanyl. This is all on Floyd.
There were so many ways that Chauvin could have fought these anti-white racially motivated charges brought by the anti-white racist Bolshevik AG Garland! So STUPID of Chauvin to plead guilty!
If he fought it and lost, he’d have been sentenced to life. This way, he may get pardoned by a future president – if we have one.
If they were to ever sentence him to life he could always appeal that decision. Twenty five years is not much of a “deal” besides It completely undercuts any appeal of state charges
That’s why it says that the definition of “unreasonable seizure” includes the use of “unreasonable force” in an otherwise reasonable seizure. And he’s stipulating that continuing to restrain Floyd in that position after he’d stopped resisting was unreasonable force, and therefore was unreasonable seizure. Of course we know he did it because he was worried about excited delirium, and he expected the ambulance to be there at any moment. But there’s no mention of that; the plea agreement is to ignore that and proceed as if it weren’t the case. Because the state jury didn’t buy it, so it’s likely a federal jury from the same pool wouldn’t buy it either.
This is extraordinarily sad, and a good example of how the justice system is corrupted by politics and the mob mentality. Having bankrupted him he was dependent on a single pro-bono attorney for the federal charges, and his appeals for his state conviction seemed side railed.
No resources, vilified by the crowd that otherwise contributes to innocence projects, and left only with his pension savings the ruthless piling on by the Biden DOJ made nearly impossible to fight both cases…and even winning one of them did him no good.
He made a wise choice…at least when he gets out he will have some means of support.
He made a mistake and, by any real standard of justice was over charged and never should have been found guilty.
I hope one day he will be able to tell his story, and that someone will at least listen.
What sort of President would it take ro pardon Chauvin?
There’d be no point. He’d just go back to state prison to continue serving his state sentence. If the whole point of this deal was to get into federal prison, then he’d turn down a presidential pardon.
meaning that all police should leave Minnesota, allowing their peaceful Muslims and blacks to have their way with the state. That would be a reasonable punishment for this.
I can’t believe all the defeatist comments on here.
Just accept the dirty crooked dealing of the state and in essence allow them to take a life because, Oh well, that’s how it is, so sad.
Jesus. I don’t think there’s ever been a nation/people more easily conquered than America and the American ppl.
Unreal, the American ppl accept this.
Wow. Hope y’all aren’t waiting for a hero because NO ONE in their right mind would stick their neck out for Americans.