Harvard professor emeritus professor Alan Dershowitz suggested on Friday in ‘The Ingraham Angle’ that Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with the death of George Floyd, could not get a fair trial in the city after the judge dismissed the defense’s calls for a room change.
DERSHOWITZ: This is a serious constitutional error. The judge focuses on the wrong case: the issue of prejudice. What he needs to focus on is that jurors will be afraid that there may be violence if they acquit or are not convicted of murder. Their own homes, their own shops, their own family can be affected.
Not only is the thumb on the scale, but also the elbow is on the scale. No jury member has to worry that if they acquit, it will have consequences for them outside the courtroom. Therefore, this trial should be held in a rural area, far away from where violence may occur.
It should be postponed for a few months and the jury should know everything that the accused of the victim would know. You must see this case through the prism – through the eyes of the defendant. If the defendant knew that he [Floyd] was violent, if he knew he was taking drugs, it is permissible. If he did not know it, it comes in another theory.
My defense would be: number one, the knee on the neck – even though we now know it was wrong – was [police] policy in Minneapolis. Not only that, it has been used dozens of times and no one has ever died. Why is this person dead? The defense would be, not because of the knee to the neck, but because of his pre-existing conditions, his high blood pressure and his drugs in the body. This was the closest cause, and the best evidence of this is that the knee to the neck has been used without death in the past.
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