Posted on 04/22/2021 6:31:15 AM PDT by Kaslin
Watching the horrific video of George Floyd dying under the knee of former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin, even before charges were filed last year, I called it the way I saw it: Murder.
I'm often accused of being pro-police to a fault. But for me the video was enough. Just as with the Laquan McDonald case in Chicago -- the Black teenager shot 16 times by a white cop -- it was the video.
But I wasn't in that Minneapolis courtroom for the Chauvin trial. The jurors were in the courtroom. They made their decision on Tuesday: Guilty on all three counts of murder and manslaughter.
The jury did its job. That's what juries are supposed to do -- examine all the evidence, deliberate and review the facts in the cool light of reason, not in the passion of the moment. The justice system is not the media trolling for clicks or politicians playing one political tribe against the other. There was plenty of gasoline poured on this case during the past year with Floyd protests in cities and with some becoming violent outbreaks of destruction and looting.
Now that Chauvin has been proven guilty in court, will there be peace in the streets?
I'd like to believe that, but ...
For one thing, the activist left, the anti-police left, has great leverage now over Democratic mayors and the Democratic Party. It would be illogical to think they'd eagerly let that power go.
You might expect an appeal in the Chauvin case that will drag out, especially since U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, a prominent Democrat, visited Minnesota and encouraged mob rule against the rule of law.
"We're looking for a guilty verdict," Waters said in Minnesota before the verdict. "We got to stay on the street. And we've got to get more active, we've got to get more confrontational. We've got to make sure that they know that we mean business."
She got the verdict she wanted. And her fellow Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, defended Waters. Of course they'd defend her. They wouldn't dare condemn her. Race-based identity politics is the core of the Democratic Party now.
In my opinion, Waters wanted to interfere with the jury proceedings. The trial judge, Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill, knew it too. He condemned her comments as "abhorrent" and said they would likely serve as the basis of a Chauvin defense appeal.
And cities across America will wait and worry, all summer.
"I wish elected officials would stop talking about this case, especially in a manner that's disrespectful to the rule of law and to the judicial branch and our function," Cahill said of Waters after he dismissed the jury from the courtroom during their deliberations.
It would have, should have, been murder no matter the races of those involved. But so much of this case involves race and historical grievances with how police have treated minorities.
Some of us who grew up during the Civil Rights era were horrified when Martin Luther King Jr. was hit by that brick in Chicago. We condemn racism. King taught us not to judge people by skin color, but by the content of their character.
Unfortunately, that's too old school now. Judging someone by the content of their character as opposed to race is something of a political sin, isn't it? A sin against the new woke religion.
Chauvin's decision to keep George Floyd under his knee for nine minutes, with passersby begging him to stop, was obviously excessive.
But I can't help thinking of another case of deadly and excessive police force.
His name was John Wrana. He was 95 years old. He fought in World War II, could barely stand up without his walker, and liked to shoot craps and have a drink and joke with the younger guys at his nursing home in south suburban Chicago.
Wrana was an old white guy.
One night, suffering from a urinary tract infection as happens to many old people, he became delirious.
He refused to go to the hospital and threatened staff with his shoehorn. Some said it was a kitchen knife. Either way, he wasn't a real threat. He couldn't stand for long.
Still, local police showed up, got behind a riot shield, and shot him repeatedly in the guts with 12-gauge beanbag shotgun rounds. He later bled out internally at the hospital.
The police officer who was not in command but pulled the trigger was a Black man, and by many accounts a good cop. He was charged not with murder but with reckless conduct and was acquitted.
I often wondered: What if the races were reversed and John Wrana had been one of America's famed Black sky warriors, a member of the decorated Tuskegee Airmen, and the officer with the pump gun was white?
The politics and media coverage would have been different, the way it's all different for the family of Peyton Ham, the 16-year-old white Maryland student holding an airsoft gun who was killed by a Maryland state trooper.
Do Americans think too much about race? Probably.
Unfortunately, too many think about race all the time, in our politics, our lives, until we're in the grave, when we all finally let it go.
Why would there be peace? The revolution is just getting started in earnest.
This is so predictable.
“Don’t hold your breath”.
Not in the habit of using internet lingo but I see what he did there.
Why would there be peace? The revolution is just getting started in earnest.
~~~
Yes. You hear a lot of the talking-heads speculate that the jury may or may not have been influenced by the mob, but if you read between the lines of so many on the left like LeBron James, the implicit message is that they feel emboldened and empowered, not for justice in the legal sense, but against the police in general. Most of them wont admit to it explicitly, but what they really want is for police to leave minorities to do as they please. The use of deadly force is unfortunate whenever it occurs, whether warranty or proportional, or not, but you can tell that what these ‘activists’ want is for police to be blamed and persecuted no matter what the circumstances are.
warranted*
I’ve said before that for some the end-game is pockets of sharia in America. But I think for many, they not only don’t care of minorities suffer oppression in pockets of high crime, they actually want this. I think they believe minorities will profit from it as a whole
Every spring and summer, and some falls since 1966, somebody for some strange reason, has put the torch to some side of town.
I don’t see it stopping, since now it is longer “than a generation”.
I keep thinking about Rudyard Kipling’s “Danegeld” poem.
Wait until it gets overturned.
>>It would have, should have, been murder no matter the races of those involved. <<
Them you did not spend 10 seconds watching the defense cross nor its case.
The knee on the UPPER BACK does NOT stop breathing and is standard police procedure since the chokehold was banned.
floyd died from drugs period.
I didn’t think the Floyd video was horrific.
I thought it was a video of a guy trying to do anything he could to not go to jail who had drug evidence on him and a long prior history of drugging & criminality.
I saw Floyd over exert himself and kill himself from that over exertion, from heart failure.
Unfortunately the coroners who testified didn’t see it that way, and that’s what tipped the scale in the end.
“Peace” was not ever the objective.. It is just another way to get mileage out the Floyd shooting. When THAT plays out.... another event will be exploited. Wash, rinse ...repeat
THAT’S the predictably juvenile, mindless level of American media and politics, now. It’s become a primitive popularization of the wholly insubstantial facts (if any) that’s fit only for moral and intellectual dwarfs.
This whole socialist agenda is meant to isolate people to make them powerless. If you reject established values then it’s a very short step to reject established authority. No surprise there.
I watched perhaps 2/3rds of the trial and much other analysis of the trial.
After all that, in good conscience, I could not have voted guilty because I do not know for sure why he died and from what.
All part of the ongoing narrative.
Think about it, of all the stories and events that go on in this country that have way more impact on people’s lives, why did they choose to focus on this one story, that really should have just stayed a local story?
Same now with reporting every single shooting that happens anywhere.
I guess the focus for the moment is to totally neuter the police, across the country.
Politics aside, any scenario will do! What is more dramatic and graphic than a police officer playing craps with is own life to protect girls threatened with a knife wielding criminal?
If my child was the potential victim of that, I’d certainly be grateful that some officer was doing his job.
But our media now is brainwashing people to think that is wrong.
“Watching the horrific video of George Floyd dying under the knee of former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin, even before charges were filed last year, I called it the way I saw it: Murder.”
And you would be proven WRONG!
ALL the evidence PROVES that George Floyd committed suicide.
You, and the jury, just chose to ignore the evidence.
I thought similarly when I FIRST saw the “video”. THEN, as facts came out, it was CLEAR that officer Chauvin did NOTHING WRONG and WHAT HE DID WAS NOT THE CAUSE OF DEATH of the life long POS criminal, drug abuser, loser.
But heh, what does it matter. The Black mob got their pound of flesh. They just want MORE! Derek Chauvin? Who cares. He’s just another raciss white guy. On to the next!
I lost this guy, John Kass, on paragraph 1 of his article. He either doesn’t know or chooses to ignore to score a few points all the evidence that Chauvin’s “knee” did not kill Floyd.
Moreover, the gutless jury just rubber stamped the mob outside and slithered home.
You’re right about that.
But the Liberal ‘power of the lie’ will be tested when more and more law abiding citizens realize what has happened to their expectation of security.
Unfortunately, time is running out!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.