The jury trial as we know it evolved from a medieval English practice in which jurors were people in the neighborhood who were already familiar with the parties or the events at issue. They were chosen precisely because they represented the local community’s knowledge of the case. Today, a “jury of one’s peers” consists of fellow-citizens whom we instead ask, ideally, to serve as blank slates: they are chosen for their lack of connection to the events and the ability to put prior views and influences aside in examining the evidence that is presented, and sometimes even dramatized, at trial. On Tuesday, after ten hours of deliberation over the course of two days, a Minneapolis jury found the former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter, for killing George Floyd, last May. In many ways, it was a conventional trial, in which eyewitnesses testified and experts weighed in on the disputed facts. Yet it called to mind a bygone mode in which the jury’s role was grounded in the act of witnessing.
The key factual disputes in the case were expertise-laden: first, whether Chauvin’s act of kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes was an unreasonable, unnecessary, and excessive use of force by a police officer, deviating from policy and training; and, second, whether Chauvin’s actions, rather than Floyd’s medical conditions and drug use, had caused Floyd’s death. The prosecution, however, focussed the all-important first week of its case not on expert analysis of those issues, but on the local community members who were there at the scene—who watched in horror as the killing unfolded, who spoke to Floyd and to Chauvin, and who used their phones to call 911.
A teen-age bystander named Darnella Frazier spoke during the trial of her Black family and friends, and of how Floyd “could have been one of them.” She confessed, “It’s been nights I stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more, and not physically interacting and not saving his life.” Although she could not save Floyd’s life, she did change the meaning of his death by recording it on her phone. As prosecutors repeatedly urged the jury to “believe your eyes,” bystanders, by documenting the facts and emotions of the event, began and ended as the key figures in the trial.
Frazier said that, at one point, when Chauvin reached for his mace, she feared for her safety. The defense said that Chauvin had a reasonable fear not only of Floyd but also of the assembled crowd, which might have made unpredictable and volatile attempts to intervene. Charles MacMillan, a sixty-one-year-old Black man, was captured on video among the bystanders telling Floyd, “You can’t win.” Floyd responded, “I’m not trying to win. I’m scared.” Other bystanders yelled to Chauvin, saying, “He’s not even resisting arrest right now, bro”; “He’s passed out”; “Stopped breathing right now, bro. Do you think that’s cool?”; and “You’re just sitting there stopping his breathing right now.” Floyd said to the crowd, “They’re going to kill me, man.” Bystanders who testified spoke of their sense of helplessness in the moment and their trauma in its aftermath, but the defense portrayed their yelling at Chauvin as justifying his concerns that they might become unruly and dangerous. The prosecution said that Chauvin “was not going to let these bystanders tell him what to do. . . . And there was nothing they could do about it because he had the authority. He had the power of the badge and the other officers and the bystanders were powerless.”
Wittingly or unwittingly, the prosecution alluded to the medieval role of the juror. The prosecution’s closing statement compared the crowd of bystanders—“people from the community randomly chosen by fate,” as witnesses—to the jurors in this case, who were “randomly selected people from the community” who “got a summons in the mail.” The bystanders’ bearing of witness, exemplified by Frazier’s video, enabled the jurors to bear witness, too. “The bystanders who were at the scene looked for themselves, and it was plain to them,” the prosecuting attorney Steve Schleicher said. “They took video. You saw it. It was plain to you.” The bystanders were powerless to stop the killing, but the jurors had the power to affirm what the witnesses allowed them to see with their own eyes.
Meanwhile, another, larger crowd of bystanders, who’d seen the video and engaged in mass protest, was watching, feeling helpless, as the jury’s unilateral power to acquit seemed to take the matter out of their hands. But the jury presumably understood that the larger crowd also had the ability to act, to take to the streets. Awaiting the decision of twelve people—or, realistically, just one who could well have refused to convict—cities girded themselves, with the increased presence of law enforcement, for riots and the destruction of property. The killing of Daunte Wright, this month, in a suburb of Minneapolis, followed by a swiftly filed manslaughter charge against the police officer who shot him, intensified the immediacy of the stakes. On Saturday, Representative Maxine Waters, of California, told protesters in the city of Brooklyn Center, where Wright was killed, to “stay on the street,” “get more active,” and “get more confrontational” in the event that Chauvin was not convicted, prompting Chauvin’s attorney to ask for a mistrial on grounds of threats and intimidation to the jury. The judge in the case, Peter A. Cahill, denied the request but said, “I’ll give you that Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned.” That statement itself is fodder for appeal, appearing to indicate that the decision not to declare a mistrial was close. (On Tuesday, the House voted along party lines not to censure Waters for allegedly inciting violence.) While the jury was sequestered and deliberating, President Joe Biden told reporters that he was “praying” for the “right verdict.” That is not a threatening, intimidating, or disrespectful statement, but it does indicate the political pressures that may make it difficult for defense attorneys to believe that the jurors’ impartiality was possible in this case. A trial that has such intense social meaning highlights the somewhat fictional nature of the aspiration that juries be independent of outside influences.
A jury is supposed to be drawn from a fair cross-section of the community, and the jurors in this case stood in the place not only of the local bystanders who witnessed the event but, also, by extension, the rest of the people who saw it, knew its meaning, and wanted action and change. As the prosecution said to the jury, “It’s what you felt in your gut. It’s what you now know in your heart. This wasn’t policing. This was murder.” Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., writing on Twitter about the guilty verdict, expressed appreciation for “the millions of people under the banner of #BlackLivesMatter standing up, speaking up and not letting up for humanity.” For now, relief takes the place of protest or unrest. But King’s implication, that a strong social and political movement helped bring about this correct but rare and surprising outcome in a case about police use of force, at once reflects a possible changing tide and is cause for worry about the verdict’s durability in the face of legal challenge.
