Let’s begin with a side bet: What will you wager that any major mainstream media outlet will report this?
Alpha News tells us that (the bolding is mine)…
“New court documents expose the “extreme pressure” prosecutors faced in Hennepin County to charge Derek Chauvin and three other former Minneapolis police officers in the death of George Floyd. Several attorneys opposed charging the “other three” officers and withdrew from the case due to “professional and ethical rules.”….hundreds of pages of sworn testimony of Hennepin County attorneys and other county employees that took place this summer have been made public.The depositions were conducted in relation to a lawsuit filed by Amy Sweasy, who was one of the office’s top prosecutors, against former County Attorney Mike Freeman. Sweasy is suing after settling a claim with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights alleging that Freeman engaged in sex discrimination and retaliation in the office. Hennepin County agreed to pay $190,000 to settle the Department of Human Rights claim.
...According to the new documents, Senior Assistant County Attorney Patrick Lofton who worked on police use-of-force cases with Sweasy said the relationship between Sweasy and Freeman soured after Lofton and Sweasy withdrew from the officers’ cases formally on June 3, 2020. Lofton explained the pressure they were under to file charges.
“The Chauvin stuff is the catalyst of this,” Lofton said, according to a transcript from his June 6 deposition. “There was extreme premium pressure, yes. The city was burning down,” Lofton said.
He explained that while he “wanted the case charged” and believed there was “probable cause to charge Mr. Chauvin with third degree murder,” the pressure from outside the office was “insane” and he had reservations about charging “the other three cops.”
Lofton wrote a letter to Freeman on June 3, 2020, explaining his decision to withdraw from the case. “I wanted it in writing, and I wanted to make sure it was documented that I wasn’t going to let that situation, what was going on in the world, affect my judgment because I have to sleep at night no matter what, and so I wrote the letter, and I wanted it to be memorialized,” Lofton said…. Assistant United States Attorney Rachel Kraker, who previously worked in the county attorney’s office, was also deposed as part of the lawsuit. “…It was about the others,” Kraker told attorneys during a June 13 deposition. “My understanding was that they withdrew because they would not file charges and that was the directive.”
“…During her deposition, Sweasy also discussed a revealing conversation she said she had the day after Floyd’s death when she asked Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker about the autopsy.
“I called Dr. Baker early that morning to tell him about the case and to ask him if he would perform the autopsy on Mr. Floyd,” she explained.
“He called me later in the day on that Tuesday and he told me that there were no medical findings that showed any injury to the vital structures of Mr. Floyd’s neck. There were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation,” Sweasy said, according to the transcript.
“He said to me, ‘Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn’t match up with the public narrative that everyone’s already decided on?’ And then he said, ‘This is the kind of case that ends careers.’”
Got that? Here’s the short version: the prosecutors in the George Floyd death case made their decision to file murder charges against the officer under whose knee the over-dosing perp George Floyd died based substantially on public and political pressure. The decision to charge the other three officers who were with Derek Chauvin was considered so unethical by several prosecutors in the office that they quit, as the Minnesota Rules of Professional Conduct requires them to do if asked to perform a clearly unethical task by a supervisor. In addition, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner told one of the prosecutors that there was no evidence that it was Chauvin’s knee that caused Floyd’s death.
All of this is consistent with the Ethics Alarms position on the case from the beginning. There was not sufficient evidence to find Chauvin guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt. There was no justification for prosecuting the three officers with him. Chauvin could not get a fair trial while Black Lives Matter mobs were running amuck in the Twin Cities, and there were plenty of other factors, including inflammatory statements by political figures, that should have compelled a mistrial. The prosecutors, judge and jury were all acting under pressure and fear that cannot be allowed to infect the justice system; this was mob justice. All four officers were convicted, none of the convictions were just, and so far at least, there is no indication that any court will have the integrity and courage to overturn the verdicts.
We have an unusual number of destructive ethics train wrecks on the nation’s tracks right now, some speeding up, like the Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck, some slowing down a bit, like the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck, while others, like the unusually steady and disastrous 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck and the current Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck are depressingly relentless. In the final analysis, however, I am not sure that the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck won’t eventually recognized as the most destructive of all, as well as the most ominous. (Appropriately enough, the four cops were “railroaded”.) Among its victims is the belief that our justice system will maintain its stated principles and values even when a defendant is unpopular, and even when pubic opinion and powerful interests demand a result in defiance of the law and facts. The conviction of the four police officers tells us that if one is sufficiently unpopular, our judges, juries and prosecutors will give up justice and betray the law for their own preservation.
Ethics Alarms 
Though many of us suspected these findings, the revelations are staggering. The desire to appeal to public opinion overrode the right to a fair trial. I wish everyone would read this piece VERY slowly and just absorb what really happened in Minnesota. The “court of public opinion” influenced the charges – and ultimately the verdict – in a court of law.
That’s terrifying.
So what are the odds that Chauvin’s verdict is overturned and he gets a new trial?
“So what are the odds that Chauvin’s verdict is overturned and he gets a new trial?”
Completely zero. No one is going to go out on that limb.
In America, the demand for racism far exceeds the supply.
This by any other name is a state sanctioned lynching.
So this country got trashed for no reason at all. No, actually it got trashed because certain people didn’t want to wait for all the facts and didn’t want cooler heads to prevail because they would rather a chance to move the ball forward on their cause, no matter who paid the price. Never let a good crisis go to waste, right? That’s what Rahm Emanuel said somewhere in between the fucking this and fucking that.
If there’s anyone who should be locked up for sedition, it’s the people who pushed this forward, protocol be damned, due process be damned, public safety be damned, everything be damned except black rage. Those are the people who should be getting locked up for 20 years or more, not the yahoos who stormed the capital and achieved nothing.
Still, this attitude does remind me of a case in Rhode Island in which a thug kill the police officer and then fled the police station, but didn’t get too far. When he was brought into court for his arraignment, his face was so swollen that it looked like someone had put a thick layer of wax over all of his features. The attorney general of Rhode Island and the FBI both concluded that there had been no civil rights violations.
The fact is that if you are considered to be a bad enough person or to have done a bad enough thing, due process can go out the window really fast and people will be okay with it. Come on, admit it, a lot of you cheer watching a lot of those cop shows where a suspect gets taken into the interrogation room and gets the tobacco juice beaten out of him. After all, the suspect is a bad guy suspected of doing a bad thing and if he doesn’t deserve the beating for this, then he probably deserves it for something else. Admit it, you also think it’s perfectly all right when some convict gets brutally raped or beaten up by another convict and the correction officers do not a damn thing. After all, this guy was definitely a bad guy and this is just a bonus on top of the deserved punishment that he is already being given.
Unfortunately, in this case the four officers involved were considered bad enough people who did a bad enough thing that due process should not apply to them and there is precisely zero chance that they will ever get any kind of unbiased justice. Even if they got it, the odds are very good but someone or several someones would exact justice by other means. There are two lessons to be drawn from this. One is to not be that guy or do that thing that is so bad that due process goes out the window, because it’s hard to prove your innocence if you are swinging from a gibbet. The other is that there are still some holes in the justice system that “street justice” or revenge disguised as justice can go through, and you do not want to be anywhere near any of those holes at any time, because if you are and the perception is wrong, someone will fucking destroy you, and no one at all will care.
Unequal justice sucks, but unfortunately it’s a fact of life. It sucks when your old school father tells you to bend over and put your hands on the workbench while he flogs the living daylights out of you because you were insufficiently differential to your mom. When it’s over you’ve got a red ass and there’s really nothing you can do about it. It sucks when you’re getting bullied at school and the teacher punishes you instead of the bully, but there’s really nothing you can do about it. It sucks when you dispute a grade and you think there is a valid basis but the teacher sneers in your face and says he’s not doing a thing about it. It sucks when the boss passes you over for promotion or denies you a raise you think you deserve, and then tells you if you don’t like it there’s the door, but you know you can’t just walk out the door because you have bills to pay. It sucks when the small town cop pulls you over and gives you a ticket that you know is bullshit, but that you’re going to pay because you don’t have time to come back here and fight it and you know the small town municipal court judge is going to side with the cop anyway.
There is theoretically always sonething that you can do about it.
In the television show Gargoyles, there is this character called Demona, whose schtick was vengeance at any and all costs against those who hurt her snd her kind.
Imagine if the whole world practiced that world view.
I am familiar with Gargoyles, and I am familiar with Demona, voiced, I believe, by Star Trek: TNG’s Marina Sirtis. Not a bad little sub-creation, sort of like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or the short-lived Masque of the Red Death setting in Ravenloft D&D. As a fantasy writer who does a lot of revenge stories myself (in fact I jokingly said once that my three Rs are Revenge, Recovery, and Restoration, since those are the themes I keep coming back to), I’m all too familiar with the concept. The thing is, usually the characters I write about are in a position to exact revenge without the almost guarantee of severe personal or professional repercussions (although there is usually at least a risk).
As often as not in real life, there is usually a near guarantee of both. It’s not for nothing that the saying “before you seek revenge, dig two graves,” exists. Like in motorcycle gangs, where before you get “patched in” you have to take all the sophomoric pranks like a champ and can’t retaliate, you have to wait your turn when you’re patched in, then abuse the next class of “hang-arounds,” same as you can pinch YOUR son’s arm till the bone almost breaks, or tell the student who dares challenge your decision to screw off, or pass the employee you hate over for everything until he gets fed up enough to leave, or pull the guy with the out-of-state license plate over and ticket him for whatever you want, then administer a “tune-up” if he gives you grief. That’s how the books balance, if they balance.
Yeah, the downside of vengeance at any and all costs is the costs.
But there ARE bad cops and bad police procedures, they just don’t get covered. Why is that? I can see people being up in arms about these, but they aren’t.
Police accidentally beat carjack victim to death instead of the carjacker
Police shoot a guy in his bed, claim he was attacking them with a hammer.
No question, Chauvin was a bad cop, and the department that continued to employ him probably deserved to be sued. But the nature of the job requires a large margin of error and the benefit of many doubts before criminal charges are justified.
Because those are clearcut cases, in which anyone sane agrees, there is little dispute. Huge public reactions are more likely in cases which are extremely disputed and contentious.
Slate start codex had a post with a similar point, unless I’m misremembering it. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
It gets worse with the accusations that the licenses of the medical examiners were threatened. The medical examiners were told to perjure themselves to support the state’s case or lose their medical licenses.
The Kyle Rittenhouse trial was no better. I think Rittenhouse had a better attorney and the prosecution relied on the testimony of a convicted felon with an illegal firearm who admitted on the stand that he had attempted to murder Rittenhouse a couple of times that night and was trying to kill Rittenhouse when Rittenhouse shot him. I think Rittenhouse might be in jail today if their star witness hadn’t admitted all that. Of course, when the fact that the star witness passed out drunk while testifying didn’t help the state much. With that testimony and the impossibly false charges, the state just thought they could convict anyone who opposed them or the mob.