Derek Chauvin and Three Former Minneapolis Officers Indicted on Federal Civil Rights Charges

Derek Chauvin and three former Minneapolis police officers were indicted Friday on federal civil rights charges after the death of George Floyd.

CBS News reported the indictment claims Derek Chauvin, Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane “deprived Floyd’s rights when they saw him lying on the ground ‘in clear need’ of medical care, but ‘willfully failed to aid Floyd, thereby acting with deliberate indifference to a substantial risk of harm.'”

The indictment continued:

Chauvin held his left knee across George Floyd’s neck, and his right knee on Floyd’s back and arm, as George Floyd lay on the ground, handcuffed and unresisting, and kept his knees on Floyd’s neck and body even after Floyd became unresponsive. This offense resulted in bodily injury to, and the death of George Floyd.

The report also said Kueng and Thao are additionally charged separately by a grand jury “in count two of the indictment for depriving Floyd’s rights,” blaming them for being “aware that [Chauvin] was holding his knee across George Floyd’s neck as Floyd lay handcuffed and unresisting,” the indictment reads. “And that Defendant Chauvin continued to hold Floyd to the ground even after Floyd became unresponsive, and the defendants willfully failed to intervene to stop Defendant Chauvin’s use of unreasonable force.”

While the three officers await trial, Chauvin, who was found guilty for second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter, filed a motion for a new trial Tuesday.

Breitbart News’s Joel B. Pollack reported Chauvin’s lawyer argued “the court should have granted the defense’s motion to move the trial out of Hennepin County, given the strong local sentiments about the case.”

Meanwhile, the Star Tribune reported April 29 that President Joe Biden’s Justice Department would have purportedly arrested Chauvin at the courthouse if the jury found him innocent on all counts.

Despite the political jockeying, Chauvin’s prosecutor and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said April 25 there was no evidence Floyd was a victim of a “hate crime” or racial bias from Chauvin.

“I wouldn’t call it that because hate crimes are crimes where there’s an explicit motive and of bias,” Ellison stated. “We don’t have any evidence that Derek Chauvin factored in George Floyd’s race as he did what he did.”