I live at 47th Street and 1st Avenue South in Minneapolis. This is about 2 miles southwest of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, where Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on Memorial Day. For more than 20 years I lived at 14th Avenue and 40th Street, maybe a half mile from an intersection that's now going to be notorious into the foreseeable future. It's sort of crazy, and terribly sad, to see on the world news pictures of streetscapes I've known intimately for forty years. It'd be different if it was in, say, a Prince music video! This, however, is embarrassing. Tonight, driving north along Nicollet Avenue to get some curbside pickup food, I was stunned to see many of the storefronts boarded up, including the restaurant/bar at 43rd Street that was my destination. There hasn't been any vandalism around here but I guess people are taking precautions. Tonight, a beautiful Friday evening at the start of summer, there is an 8:00 curfew across the city. Last night, you could hear sirens continuously. When I took out some garbage, I could hear but not see helicopters low in the sky to the northeast, where the trouble was.
I've forced myself to watch the video. It feels pornographic, like a snuff film. Some people say, well, it's "taken out of context." But the context is a police call about someone trying to pass a bad $20-bill at a corner grocery. He wasn't armed. His crime, assuming he knew it was a bad bill, wasn't remotely violent. His hands were cuffed behind his back while one of Minneapolis's finest slowly strangled him for about 9 minutes. Of course the cop had to hear the decent people complaining, raising their voices in alarm and filming him with their phones. Impassive, he persisted. One way to account for this might be that he'd been doing more or less the same thing for years. Three other cops standing around, doing a lot of nothing. They don't appear surprised. As his colleague killed a guy, one of them told the worried onlookers not to do drugs. Wtf? "Just a few bad apples," we're told. Right, but 4 out of 4 responding to this police call about a guy with a fake $20-bill: how unlucky. In retrospect, maybe the onlookers should have tried to pull the cop off the guy. Would the other three then have come to the assistance of their colleague? In that case, there would have been a street fight between decent people and the thugs with badges and guns.
Around 20 years ago, I was called to serve on a grand jury in Hennepin County. You are basically "on call" for several months, and have to report for duty when the County Attorney has a case to present to a grand jury. Most of the cases you hear are for first degree murder, because a grand jury indictment is required to proceed against a defendant who, if convicted, would be subject to the maximum penalty of life in prison.
You get used to the drill. First witness is usually someone from the medical examiner's office with gruesome morgue pictures. So, a corpse, and cause of death is a gunshot wound. Then come the homicide detectives with what they've discovered. The prosecutors are zealous and solemn. There's been a serious crime and they think they know who did it. They want an indictment, and that's what we gave them. Fine, because the murder cases were all strong.
One case was different from the others. After all these years, I might be violating an oath to get into the details, but the case was not first degree murder. It related to a police shooting. It wouldn't have had to be presented to a grand jury, but possibly the county attorney, at the time Amy Klobuchar, did not want to make a tough call. Let a grand jury decide! Everything was suddenly different. Prosecutorial zeal had gone missing. It was the only case where the suspect appeared before us. Instead of leading the medical examiner and homicide detectives through the incriminating evidence, the "prosecutor" led the cop, who appeared in the grand jury room in full dress uniform, through his side of the story. The "prosecutor" was now like Kenny Jay, the professional wrestler whose job was to turn a few somersaults before getting pinned. I did not think the situation called for "deadly force," but it was obvious I was 1-out-of-23 holding that opinion, 24 if you count Kenny Jay, and an indictment required 12 votes. Amy got to say the grand jury heard all the evidence and cleared the cop.
I don't often think about it, but the last few days the memory of this has irritated me. Should have been more pugnacious. Instead, I feel I was recruited for a bit part in a long, rigged game from which this Chauvin fellow reasonably concluded that he could jack people around with impunity. That could be what attracted him to police work in the first place—the prospect of jacking people around. If you're interested in grand juries, here is an informative article outlining criticisms that match pretty nearly my own experience of what's wrong with them.
The pic at the top is of something happier: a middle school basketball team I played against. Bryant Junior High was on 38th Street a few blocks west of Chicago Avenue. Number 3 in the front row quit playing basketball and ended up doing, for example, this:
Amen. One of my first cases as a lawyer over 30 years ago was against the city of Mpls and multiple police officers for violating my client's federal civil rights. She was assaulted during an arrest while other officers watched and failed to intervene. Seems like not much has changed.
Posted by: Steve Fiebiger | May 30, 2020 at 08:09 AM