Quote (Goomshill @ Dec 24 2021 05:40am)

Also in case anyone missed it, the state is seeking an upwards departure to throw the book at Potter. In Minnesota, 70% of felony convictions and somewhere around 90+% of first-time offenders get a downward departure or presumptive stayed sentence from the point system, though that caps out below manslaughter which still falls into the 25%+ of discretionary departures. Meanwhile only 0.2% of cases a year get upward departures, reserved for the most heinous and recidivist criminals. If you compare this pre/post 2015 its a bit misleading because before that, they included time-served plea deals with upward departures as aggravated sentences even though it had no extra prison time, but since then they've tracked upward departures and its been incredibly rare.

Naturally, they gave Chauvin one of those rare upward departures and are now ready to take a swing at Potter. She'll be treated as the most vile, loathsome beast to ever terrorize Brooklyn Park

Quote (Goomshill @ Dec 24 2021 06:23am)

Whether he was right or wrong to use that particular hold- a hold that was listed in the police training manuals of the time- doesn't change the critical matter at the heart of the case, whether Chauvin caused Floyd's death or not. Its an irrelevancy. Either Chauvin caused Floyd's death, or he's innocent of the murder and manslaughter charges. Its the most basic requirement of a conviction, proximate causation. If Chauvin walked up to a hobo on a freezing street and shot him in the head with a pistol at point blank range, and the medical examiner found the hobo had actually frozen to death the previous night, he couldn't be convicted of murder (but a slam dunk on attempted murder). Either you cause the death or you don't. It doesn't matter if it looks bad or wasn't proper or gives you an emotional response. When all the physical evidence says George Floyd died of a drug overdose and Chauvin's knee wasn't contributing in any substantial way, then the state not only falls short of the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' standard, but Chauvin actually proves his innocence to within a 'preponderance of evidence' standard. Trying to dance around every piece of contrary evidence had them tied up into ridiculous knots with all the wild theories. And that's how we wind up with this endpoint where the state's winning argument involves George Floyd developing a superhuman tolerance to Fentanyl while Chauvin expertly placed his knee on Floyd's neck in just such a sweet spot that Floyd could still talk even with his airways occluded, not leaving a mark despite 9 minutes of a man's full weight on a small cross section crushing him to death.

I like the side that has a consistent and rational explanation for every detail, not the one doing the moon landing denial routine

Quote (Goomshill @ Dec 24 2021 06:40am)

Also in case anyone missed it, the state is seeking an upwards departure to throw the book at Potter. In Minnesota, 70% of felony convictions and somewhere around 90+% of first-time offenders get a downward departure or presumptive stayed sentence from the point system, though that caps out below manslaughter which still falls into the 25%+ of discretionary departures. Meanwhile only 0.2% of cases a year get upward departures, reserved for the most heinous and recidivist criminals. If you compare this pre/post 2015 its a bit misleading because before that, they included time-served plea deals with upward departures as aggravated sentences even though it had no extra prison time, but since then they've tracked upward departures and its been incredibly rare.

Naturally, they gave Chauvin one of those rare upward departures and are now ready to take a swing at Potter. She'll be treated as the most vile, loathsome beast to ever terrorize Brooklyn Park

Quote (LouisLeGros @ Dec 23 2021 01:34pm)

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/outcome-reached-trial-kim-potter-ex-officer-charged-daunte-wrights-dea-rcna9408

Another case of getting some accountability for the actions of the police.

Quote

The jury — one Black person, two Asian American people and nine white people — convicted her of the lesser charge at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, according to jury forms read in court.

Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ Dec 24 2021 05:34am)

Your "already dead homeless guy you shoot" analogy fails because WE KNOW FLOYD WAS STILL ALIVE. If you walk up to a homeless guy who's in the process of freezing to death and you shoot him. You are basically saying "He didn't die from the gun shot, he would have easily survived that gunshot. He died from hypothermia. You need some conspiracy where he's magically immune to freezing temperatures to blame Chauvin". Yeah, the gun shot is more extreme, but that's the jist of it.

The standard for murder or manslaughter is not "you were the one single causative agent in the death". Chauvin only needed to be one part of the equation in Floyd dieing the moment he did. If Floyd would have lasted even a second longer without the knee on his neck then Chauvin can be convicted for Floyd's death. That is the standard to say Chauvin killed him. Only that he's a contributory factor at the moment of death.

If Chauvin had gotten up, adminstered aid, and otherwise broken the chain of causality that lead to Floyd's death, he likely would have gotten off. But he didn't. He was still leaning on him when Floyd died, so the chain is unbroken and the jury merely needs to see that Chauvin was part of the cause at that moment. From there, it's just a matter of degree.

Quote (Santara @ Dec 24 2021 05:48am)

Why is Black and Asian American capitalized, but not White?

Quote

AP’s style is now to capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa. The lowercase black is a color, not a person. AP style will continue to lowercase the term white in racial, ethnic and cultural senses.

Quote (chadfc92 @ Dec 24 2021 05:47am)

there was not enough fent to kill him.
there were 2 separate autopsy saying death by asphyxiation.

we should hold police to a higher standard since they are paid to protect and serve the citizens not the exact opposite.

Quote (Goomshill @ Dec 24 2021 05:52am)

In the classic law school frozen hobo thought experiment, nobody knows the real cause of death until the autopsy. They just assumed it was a murder based on the scene of the crime and eyewitnesses up until the ME comes back and declares he was dead from another cause. Even the gunman thinks he's a murderer. The purpose being that its a hypothetical where actus reas and mens reas can both exist, but proximate causation does not, and thus its not a murder. Murder has to consist of four elements, criminal act, a criminal intent, causation and harm. And thus, the standard for murder of manslaughter is literally, as matter of fact and law, that you are the proximate causative agent in the death. Not merely a contributing factor. In fact, this is an entire legal chapter. Causation only exists on a but-for standard, a proximate and foreseeable cause that cannot be remote, and cannot be be superseded by an intervening proximate cause. If an intervening superseding cause exists, like the person downing an entire bag of fentanyl/meth fake percocets and OD'ing on them, then only the intervening superseding cause is the legal cause.

Being 'part of a cause' isn't a legal cause. When cops show up and someone downs a bag of fake percocets to hide the evidence, the cops are still a factual cause in that chain of events and their presence set it in motion. Doesn't make them the legal cause.

Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ Dec 24 2021 06:03am)

Let's say a homeless person is freezing and you shoot him in the leg. He loses some blood. Not enough to be lethal. He dies. He was going to die a few hours later from hypothermia, but you sped up his death by hypothermia by several hours and prevented him from getting any help during that time by injuring his leg. That's still murder. That's what we have here. Floyd might have been overdosing, but Floyd sped it up and prevented him from getting help.

It's not the same as a cop busting in and a guy downing a bag of pills. They didn't shove the pills down his throat after all. The vast majority of people don't down a bag of pills during a raid, and it was his choice to down them. There's a bunch of steps in between. The police are not the proximate cause.

However, in the case of the homeless person freezing to death and in the case of Floyd / Chauvin there is a direct and unbroken line of causation where you sped up the death by a significant factor thus making you a proximate cause. Now all that's left is forseeability to see if its manslaughter or murder.

Quote (Goomshill @ Dec 24 2021 06:13am)

Minnesota does not follow an 'acceleration theory' causation. Its actually very rare and recently got nerfed at the federal level by Burrage v US in 2014 in a 9-0 decision, which explicitly distinguished between proximate causation and accelerated causation and said that when a statute creates a criminal liability for deaths that 'result from' the sale of drugs, the jury must follow a but-for proximate causation and cannot be instructed on a 'contributing cause' theory. Not exactly the same case, but similar enough to get the gist of it. As per the jury instructions in the Chauvin case (not that they mattered), murder causation requires proximate causation, not a contributing factor. Chauvin's actions had to be the proximate cause of Floyd's death, not just moving the needle forward.