MINNEAPOLIS — Hearing the prosecution’s medical experts, one
after the next, testify that a lack of oxygen killed
George Floyd was already
enough to convince Lisa Christensen that
Derek Chauvin was guilty of murder.
اضافة اعلان
Then the defense witnesses took to the stand — and they only
solidified her confidence in the prosecution’s case.
When one of them, Barry Brodd, a police expert, suggested that
someone could rest comfortably in the prone position, face down on the
pavement, he lost her, Christensen said. Then came the defense’s medical
expert, Dr David Fowler, Maryland’s former chief medical examiner. She did not
buy his explanation that a combination of drugs, preexisting medical conditions
and even carbon monoxide were to blame for Floyd’s death.
“I just don’t think it was real believable,” Christensen said of
the defense’s case. “The prosecutors were true to their opening statements.
They said in their opening statements, ‘Believe your eyes. What you see, you
can believe.’ And for me, that was true.”
Christensen, 56, had a rare view of the trial of Chauvin: She
was one of 14 jurors selected to serve on the case.
For three weeks she sat anonymously in a courtroom on the 18th
floor of a courthouse in downtown Minneapolis, referred to only as Juror 96 as she
listened to 45 witnesses and the arguments of the lawyers in one of the most
consequential police killing cases the country has ever seen.
Ultimately, she did not get to help decide Chauvin’s fate. Once
all the testimony and arguments had wrapped up, the judge, Peter Cahill, told
her and another juror that they were the alternates. So they were sent home
while the remaining 12 were sequestered in a hotel room to deliberate.
But in an interview Thursday, it seemed like Christensen’s view
of the case aligned with the rest of the jury, which took just 10 hours to
convict Chauvin, a white former Minneapolis police officer, of all three
charges he faced in the killing of Floyd, a Black man, including second-degree
murder.
None of the jurors who deliberated and decided Chauvin’s fate
have chosen to speak out, so Christensen’s description of how she saw the trial
is the only insight yet provided into how members of the jury perceived the
case.
Christensen, who said she entered the trial having seen very
little of the gruesome video of Floyd’s murder, described an experience that
was more taxing than she could have imagined. It was filled with unexpected
twists, from the mundane — a minicrisis when the Cheetos ran out in the jury
room — to the extraordinary, when the police killed a 20-year-old man six
blocks from her home in the suburb of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, during the
trial.
“It was more emotional and more draining than I thought,” she
said of her jury service.
Christensen, who is white, said that while she felt that Chauvin
was in the wrong, she did not view the case through the larger prism of racial
justice. She believes that there is a problem with racism in the country but
said she was not well versed on the nuances of it.
She recently got into a dispute with her roommate, who is Black,
when she asked him why Floyd and other people do not just comply with police
commands. “Several times they had to say, ‘Get out of the car,’ or, ‘Put your
hands on the steering wheel.’ And for whatever reason, he just didn’t do it.”
But she said that even if she did not understand Floyd’s resistance, he was
treated improperly by the officers.
Her feelings were solidified during the testimony of Dr Martin
Tobin, a pulmonologist called by the prosecution. He gave a detailed
explanation of how humans breathe, even instructing the jurors to feel
different parts of their throat and neck as he testified. He also analyzed
Floyd’s breathing from a video that showed Chauvin kneeling on his neck.
“He pointed out exactly when Mr. Floyd took his last breath,”
she said. “So that was powerful. And then I feel like all the doctors that the
prosecutors presented pretty much said the same thing in so many different ways.
I feel like they all came to the same conclusion.”
Asked if there was a moment when she doubted the prosecution’s
case and thought that maybe Chauvin was not guilty, Christensen was
unequivocal: “No.”
If the medical experts were decisive for her regarding Floyd’s
cause of death, Christensen said testimony from bystanders helped her to
understand how out of line Chauvin was. Sitting close to the witness box, she
teared up at times when witnesses cried as they recalled seeing the life slowly
pressed out of Floyd. One moment in particular that got to her, Christensen
said, was when a girl on the stand fought back tears, but her chin quivered.
“I was hearing what they were saying, but I also felt it,” she
said. “I could feel the guilt. I could feel their pain.”
The bystanders did not seem like an angry mob to her, as Chauvin’s
lawyer suggested, Christensen said. Rather, they seemed to have more awareness
of the situation than Chauvin and the three other officers involved in Floyd’s
fatal arrest.
“How can all these different people stand on the sidewalk and
notice there is something wrong in this situation; I mean, even a 9-year-old
could tell you something was wrong,” she said. “How come grown officers, that
this is your profession, you’ve had multiple hours of being trained, that you
guys can’t tell there’s something wrong?”
Christensen said she felt that Eric Nelson, Chauvin’s lawyer,
had made good points about what a “reasonable officer” would do as he explained
his client’s actions in the nearly 17 minutes leading up to the moment that he
took Floyd to the ground and knelt on him. But it seemed like he could offer no
good explanation for Chauvin’s actions in the nine minutes and 29 seconds he
knelt on Floyd, she said.
And she did not believe that Chauvin could have explained it
away, so she said it was probably a good idea that he did not testify on his
own behalf.
“I don’t think he comes across as, like, a likable kind of guy,”
she said. “And maybe that’s just because we’ve seen the video so many times and
that picture. Him sitting in the courtroom, he just gave off a cold vibe.”
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