WASHINGTON – A US judge yesterday postponed the trial of three former Minneapolis policemen charged in the killing of George Floyd to March 2022 in order to let a federal prosecution against them go ahead first.
White ex-officer Derek Chauvin, 45, was convicted in April of murdering African-American Floyd last year in a case that prompted a national reckoning on racial injustice and police brutality.
A video taken by a bystander showed Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes as he was handcuffed face-down on the street struggling to breathe.
Chauvin’s three former co-workers – Tou Thao, 35, J. Alexander Kueng, 27, and Thomas Lane, 38 – who were involved in Floyd’s fatal arrest, were to go on trial starting August 22 for being complicit in murder.
But a federal grand jury last week charged all four men with civil rights crimes in connection with Floyd’s killing.
The federal indictment accuses the former officers of, among other charges, depriving Floyd of his constitutional right “to be free from the use of unreasonable force” by police.
At a procedural hearing yesterday, judge Peter Cahill said that the federal charges were “much greater” and it makes “more sense for the federal case to go forward” first.
As a result, he postponed the start of the three former officers’ trial to March 7, 2022.
Dual prosecutions at both the state and federal level are permitted in the United States but are relatively rare, highlighting the importance of this case, which sparked a massive wave of national demonstrations last summer. – AFP, May 14, 2021
