A Minnesota jury has found former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. This means they claim to have concluded that they unanimously believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin caused Floyd’s death.

Given the circumstances of the trial, however, it’s extremely hard to believe the jury was solely concerned with either truth or justice. It’s extremely hard, if not impossible, for any thinking person not to have a reasonable doubt about the outcome.

We know the judge in the case refused to sequester jurors from media coverage and outside influences during the trial, and that the pressure conveyed to them was beyond intense. It was made perfectly clear to them that the nation would be engulfed in flames if they expressed they did in fact have a reasonable doubt over whether Floyd’s death was Chauvin’s fault.

The entire bloody year of 2020, in which unprecedented and murderous riots swept the nation, was premised on the incident that led to this trial. At least 30 people died amid waves of riots that widely used Floyd’s death as the pretext. The Floyd riots have caused the most high-dollar damage in U.S. history, an estimated $2 billion.

The rioters’ violence against police, and elected officials’ willful endorsement of the rioters and failure to back law and order in response, helped cause a historic surge in homicides. As measured across 34 sampled cities, homicides surged 30 percent in 2020, causing an additional 1,200 dead. That’s just in 34 cities.

So, thanks to the anti-police unrest employed in the wake of Floyd’s death, thousands more people are now dead, and a disproportionate number of them are black. The riots’ unchecked anti-police violence metastasized in deadly crime. Anyone who lives in or near a city like these jurors do, especially those in the Twin Cities epicenter, is fully aware of this.

That was all before the verdict. During the Chauvin trial itself, “hundreds” of rioters smashed buildings and assaulted police nearby in the aftermath of another officer-involved shooting. Minneapolis police put up razor wire around their offices in preparation for the verdict announcement. So did police and cities across the nation.

National Guard troops were deployed in Minnesota and D.C. in anticipation of the verdict announcement.

The jurors knew that the media covering the trial and looking at their faces every day for three weeks knows who they are. An in-state newspaper even signaled to the jurors its willingness to expose them to the violent mobs roving Minnesota over the last year by publishing descriptions of the jurors in advance of the verdict. Those descriptions published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune contained age, race, location, profession, even immigration history.

You think jurors would have been willing to have themselves and their families go into witness protection to venture a reasonable doubt about Chauvin’s potential contribution to Floyd’s death? You think they’d be willing to trade their lives plus nationwide violence for one stranger’s? If you think that, you know nothing about human nature.

Officials from the local mayor all the way up to the president of the United States made it clear in widely reported news the jurors and all their family, friends, and neighbors could read and would have to live with for the rest of their lives that the only verdict they would accept was “guilty.” Democrat politicians openly called for violence if the jury did not decide as street thugs wished, and the Democrat Party — which controls all levels of the national government at present, as well as controlling the state in which these jurors live — backed them up.

“I’m very worried,” Rep. Karen Bass said on CNN’s “State of the Union” about the likelihood of violence across the nation should the jury vote “the wrong way.” “I don’t think anyone in Minneapolis, frankly, anyone in the United States or over a good part of the world would understand any other verdict other than guilty.”

News that jurors, and their families they went home to at night, could read during the trial also told of a severed pig’s head left at the former house of a witness who testified on behalf of Chauvin. The witness’s former house — half a country away from the trial, in northern California — was also doused in blood. And his former employer, a local police department, disavowed him over his testimony.

Everyone, including these jurors, knew exactly what would happen to them at the hands of mobs like this if they expressed a reasonable doubt about whether a man who died while overdosing and with a serious heart condition was actually killed by a police officer kneeling on him after he had struggled with police repeatedly. Reasonable doubts about whether the jury’s decision was justice or politics seem fully justified.

The city government building where jurors heard the case was fortified like a military installation in an occupied country. Every day, they walked into this.

You can’t tell me all of this didn’t affect jurors’ psyche and ultimate decision. They would be superhuman or inhuman if it didn’t. Yet those endorsing mob culture and vigilante “justice” for political ends are working hard to make it impossible to express such reasonable doubts, whether in a column or as a member of a murder jury.

Jurors are always human. There is always room for miscalculation, fear, and error. In this case, however, it is extremely clear that these human weaknesses were deliberately amplified to catastrophic proportions, all because of politics.

A fair trial might indeed have come to the same conclusion for Chauvin. But we’ll never know, and never be able to trust this outcome, because America’s left purposefully made a fair trial impossible, all for political power.

They deliberately perverted justice in favor of violent mob rule to strengthen their political hand. They have done evil and called it justice. They have sown the wind, and the resulting whirlwind has still not fully hit our nation yet. But it will.

Source: The Federalist

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