It’s the best defense you can present in a murder case — because it directly undermines an essential element of the prosecution’s case: INTENT.
The prosecution probably won’t be able to prove intent to murder, but I think he will be convicted on the unintentional murder charges - third degree murder and manslaughter. He didn’t render first aid to George Floyd fast enough.
While I am not a lawyer, I am in a technical trade that has to deal with a lot of court cases.
When there is a violation (injury, accident, environmental) the first step is “Was the procedure followed?”
A good portion of the time, that answer is “no” and now you go down that rather horrible rabbit hole.
However, in a recent injury case were the procedure was followed, the response became “Was the procedure correct? Would a reasonable person understand that the procedure was correct?”
That is the scary one. See “Reasonable” has a very specific meaning. If the procedure was being followed, but still resulted in an injury, the Injured Person AND the person who developed the procedure are suddenly under the microscope. In the case I am mentioning the lead man was following documented procedure, had plenty of evidence that the procedure was being followed as documented, was still held liable because it did not pass the “reasonable” step.
Can’t go into to many more specifics than that.
So now the defense has to argue that a reasonable response is to put a knee to a handcuffed mans neck for 9 minutes, while the man is crying for help, because that is following procedure.
In my world (technical again), such a procedure would result in the person doing the activity AND the person/s who wrote the procedure facing liability for the injury. “Following the department procedure” is not a defense, and has been called out as such in many, many training sessions I have been in since I was a shiny hat engineer.
To say that the police are held to a lesser standard than engineers means we are in a horrible situation.