At the Hennepin County Government Center on Tuesday afternoon, Judge Peter Cahill opened a yellow envelope and read out the verdict against Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who, last May, kneeled on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, killing Floyd and igniting a nationwide uprising against police abuse and systemic racism. Chauvin wore a pale-blue face mask. His eyes darted from side to side. The verdict was guilty on charges of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. And, within just a few minutes, it was over. Chauvin, now a convicted murderer, was handcuffed and led out of the courtroom. Cahill thanked the jury for its “heavy-duty service.” Bail was revoked. The sentence will be handed down in eight weeks.
Outside, on a broad lawn, several hundred people had congregated to wait for the news. There were Black Lives Matter activists, reporters, and many people who rushed to the area after getting alerts on their phones that the judge would soon read out the will of the jury. And, when they heard the first of the three guilty verdicts, the reaction was loud and unambiguous.
“It was an explosive cheer,” Jelani Cobb told me, by telephone, from the courthouse. Cobb, a staff writer at The New Yorker, a historian, and the Ira A. Lipman professor of journalism at Columbia University, has been in Minneapolis covering the trial for the magazine. And he has been covering issues of race and criminal justice for many years, from Newark to Atlanta and beyond. We spoke at length on Tuesday; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Jelani, can you start by telling me where you are and what it’s like to be there?
I’m in front of the courthouse, on the lawn, at the same spot where, last week, Ben Crump, the lawyer for the Floyd family, had a rally and press conference. When the news came that there was a verdict coming, the crowd here went from fifty to several hundred in no time. Before the verdict was announced, there was a lot of anxiety. There was a sizable military contingent on the scene, too, in case of a verdict that caused an . . . adverse reaction. People were nervous. People were jumpy. People were watching on their phones. Someone from Black Lives Matter had a bullhorn, and when the first ‘guilty’ was called out the crowd reacted. Real ebullience. Lots of raised fists in the air. And now there are loads of cars jamming the intersection here, people hitting their horns, a huge traffic jam.
How did you react to the verdict?
Honestly, I am surprised that they came back guilty on all three counts. But it turns out that the prosecution pitched a shutout. From experience and from learning about the unpredictable dynamics of these situations, you might have expected some sort of split verdict, kind of splitting the difference, but to get all three guilty verdicts was, at least to me, unanticipated.
How am I feeling? It’s hard to describe. It’s important to remember that nothing that happened today changes the fact that we were witness to a man losing his life in the most excruciating way, while constantly saying he couldn’t breathe and begging for intercession from his dead mother. Some things you will never get out of your mind. Rather than say of the verdict that this is the best-case scenario, I’d prefer to say that it’s the least worst-case scenario.
Were you shocked by the murder itself?
I was not shocked, no. I was disgusted and horrified. But you had to know, if you have been observing these things for long enough, that such things are always possible. That’s been one of the most essential things about this whole case—that we are now, all of us, Black and white, on the same page. Or should be. It’s that rare moment when we see through the same lens. We see what the terms are. We see what the issues of criminal justice in this country really are. This clarifies the terms of the discussion.
Not that there is any guarantee that much will be done. . . .
Right. Because, on the one hand, you have the catharsis of a triple-guilty verdict. But at the same time, in the midst of the trial, we had the police shooting of a young man, Daunte Wright, just down the road, in Brooklyn Center.
What does this mean for the city of Minneapolis?
There are lots of questions. First, what kind of police department are they going to have? There are people here in town who are still organizing around abolishing the force as it exists and creating an alternative structure for public safety. Also, I’d anticipate increased attention to the other trials coming up, in August, of the three other officers who were present when George Floyd was killed.
What has been the atmosphere in town leading up to the verdict?
It’s been incredibly tense. A lot of establishments and buildings in town were boarded up. There was real fear. They were worried that a lesser verdict or an acquittal would set off a wave of demonstrations and violence. Talking with people in various communities, I found that there were a lot of people who expressed the idea that, at best, Derek Chauvin might be convicted of the least of the charges. And nearly everyone here, across all kinds of lines of age and race and class, predicted chaos if he was acquitted outright. Younger African-Americans, in particular, didn’t rule out the possibility of an acquittal.
How did you evaluate the prosecution and the way it made its case against Chauvin?
The prosecutors did a few things that were interesting. The first notes that you heard from them were the emotional notes. They went through how deeply the community near where George Floyd was killed was traumatized. Not only the people who knew him but others, too, like the 911 dispatcher. Then came the real meat of the case. You got a parade of experts—medical people, especially—knocking down the defense’s contentions, one after another. The prosecution’s closing argument was especially revealing. The argument was calibrated to any jurors who might have had any qualms about sending a police officer to prison for many years. The theme was, subtly, “Remember, it’s not the system that’s on trial—it’s this one guy.” In a way, this was a pro-cop strategy for the prosecution, and it was carefully designed to assuage any uneasiness a juror might have.
Chauvin himself was barely a presence.
Reporters were not in the courtroom. So, like you, we never saw the jury and its reactions. And we saw Derek Chauvin only infrequently. He remained an enigma throughout. Here was this person at the center of a national tempest, and yet we couldn’t really tell what his thoughts or reactions were. Was he contrite? The one time we got to hear from him was when he said he wouldn’t testify, and there he seemed almost cavalier. And people noticed that. But, in general, it was hard to see how he was processing all this. He remained as shrouded in mystery as he was in the nine minutes-plus that he was kneeling on George Floyd’s neck.
What did you make of the defense? Could you discern a strategy there?
The defense? I’d make a baseball analogy: a pitcher who throws a lot of everything—knuckleballs, screwballs, curves—and hopes that something, anything, works. So, for instance, they brought out their carbon-monoxide defense, saying that George Floyd was affected by the exhaust from the squad car. It reminded me of the Twinkie defense in the killing of Harvey Milk, in 1978, in San Francisco. Remember that? The defense threw out everything they could, playing the game of raising any kind of doubt they could—the drug-overdose theory, the heart-attack theory—and it was all knocked down. In the end, the defense lawyers had the unenviable task of getting a jury past a video that the whole world had seen.
Is it possible to ascribe a lasting meaning to this trial?
If Derek Chauvin had not been convicted, it would have said to the world that there is absolute impunity for police. Most Black people already think that. Recently, we saw another instance that made the systemic nature of things plain. In Chicago, not only did the police shoot Laquan McDonald in the back—the entire system in that city was implicated because the video of that killing was buried. And, in North Charleston, we saw on video a police officer shoot Walter Scott in the back, and then we learned that he had dropped a Taser near his body, to imply that Scott had run off with the Taser. Even that initially ended in a mistrial. And that all took place in the context of the massacre when a white supremacist killed nine Black people in a church in downtown Charleston.
There is this question about the extent to which the system is culpable. With Derek Chauvin, you couldn’t get around the systemic implications of what had happened. The fact is that George Floyd’s life was extinguished, and no one intervened. Chauvin had been on the force for well over a decade. The trial, the whole affair, started to add up to its larger implications. The trial strategy tried to limit things to a conversation about one man going rogue, that Chauvin did what no good cop would have done. Ultimately, that’s not true. It’s not just one cop. Everyone here in Minneapolis, all the people I’ve talked to, say the same thing: we all know how much work needs to be done on the greater issue, on the issue of systemic racism.
