What scientific evidence would have to be found within this three-dimensional reality in order to create the possibility of changing your mind to consider that it could have simply been congestive heart failure combined with opioid respiratory depression?

A dearth of evidence that his abdomen was compressed by the weight of 2 men for 9.5 minutes.

man the emotional response from Conservatives over the the Floyd death is still there.
The lack of accepting the outcome of a trial is pretty strong for the law & order crowd.

it's not the outcome, it's the travesty of justice. and georgie boy killed himself by gulping down a lot of drugs.



no, the drugs he took it's what killed him.

I'll take responses that don't acknowledge drug tolerances for $400, Alex.

you can't tolerate how much he took. georgie boy was overweight and eating drugs, quite the calamity.

The topline conclusion that magically had zero supporting evidence laid out anywhere in the text of the autopsy, which didn't exist on the first draft and was only put in after Freeman's office went to visit the ME and 'correct' him?
You're right, we've done this ad nauseum.
And I've pointed out before, the logical observation is always the one where your conclusion is based upon the weight of the evidence. Rather than the one where you already have a conclusion and shape a wild theory that tries to nimbly pass through every small hole in the evidence and just flattens itself against several brick walls in the process anyway. There's not a single piece of evidence in the autopsy of physical harm from the restraint, but there were a dozen ways they ruled it out. They checked for everything that could be present, but wasn't, bruising, subdermal trauma, petechial hemorrhaging, etc. We can see that it didn't blood choke Floyd or cut off his airflow enough to stop him from talking freely, nor was the force enough to stop him from moving his head. There's not just one or two indicators of a drug overdose, there's every possible indicator. They have his history of near-death overdoses on the same drug, his history of chronic heart problems, the far above lethal dose in his system, the polysubstance abuse, the 90% blocked coronal artery, the 3:1 LVH, the 200% enlarged heart, the evidence at the same and witness statements that show he downed the whole bag of fentanyl when the police showed up.

In a sane world, we'd say that there is a preponderance of evidence that establishes Chauvin didn't cause Floyd's death. In a nutty world, we'd construct a wild theory to suggest its possible that Chauvin happened to use the goldilocks sweet point of force that wasn't enough to leave a mark but was just enough to restrict airflow a bit, and hovered expertly in that position for 8 minutes, and that reduction of airflow could somehow have been a causal factor in Floyd's heart failing that was not actually occurring due to the lethal dose of Fentanyl, but instead we're supposed to believe that Floyd had a tolerance to the drug. Despite the part where just months prior he was hospitalized a blood pressure of 216/160, something you'd expect from a loony toons character, the "how is he even alive" levels.

But hey we can always lower the evidence burden in our criminal system from "proved beyond a reasonable doubt" to "speculated in spite of evidence". I guess that's the difference in end goals between Libertarian and Civil Libertarian

This post was edited by Goomshill on Nov 13 2021 12:44pm

You know what they mean by "lethal dose?"

50% of people who reach it can be expected to die. That means doses less than lethal are fatal, and also that concentrations above the threshold might not be. It is well known that Floyd had a metabolized byproduct of fentanyl in his system, indicating a high tolerance. My great aunt once measured .89 BAC, which is double the lethal level of alcohol in her system and she lived.

FWIW I agree with your points and reasoning.
I would also add that there is clear evidence he was in serious distress and said he couldn't breathe long before the officers took him to the ground.

Many people cannot bring themselves to reason beyond their initial reaction to the first viral video and their factional loyalties.
He wasn't even choked to death in the manner people initially thought.

To me all of those factors are sufficient cause for reasonable doubts that should prevent a murder conviction.

Of course that doesn't mean I like chauvin or think he acted completely appropriately. Nor does it necessarily mean he didn't contribute to the distress Floyd was in.
I also think he was very slow to react to Floyd going unconscious.
A lot was made out of the 7 or 8 minutes he was held on the ground, but I think its reasonable to suspect Floyd would have died even if Chauvin and Co got off of him sooner.

I would also like to go back to that meme, which was absolutely ridiculous.
It asserts all of his weight was on Floyd and that it was exactly equally split between both legs because one toe/foot was off the ground at one point.
Weight can and is unevenly distributed and can be shifted, even if a toe is off the ground.
A knee can be placed on someone's neck/back area to pin them in place without anywhere near all or half of your weight on them.
The TOE!!! was a comically bad focal point and mathematical inference.

The evidence very clearly shows that Floyd had been taking fentanyl that morning before the encounter, hence his happy dancing in the story and nodding off in the car. Everyone said he was visibly high. Hence, metabolizing fentanyl. Then when he was arrested, he ingested some unknown quantity of fentanyl, enough that he was spitting some back up while in the squad car handcuffed, and yet rest of the drugs weren't recovered, indicating he swallowed all of them. Hence, a large dose of unmetabolized fentanyl in his system when he died.
The amount in his system was far higher than the lethal dose floor, enough to kill a horse, let alone a healthy human, let alone someone with extreme risk factors. But if we were going to try to explain the ratio of unmetabolized::metabolized fentanyl in his blood by saying he had only taken it earlier in the day and that singular dose was only partially metabolized, then the original dose would have to be far higher amount. Fentanyl at 11 ng/ml, Norfentanyl at 5.6 ng/ml. The metabolic ratio of Fentanyl/Norfentanyl is around 1:2.5 or 1:3 and is excreted around 0.4-6% as fentanyl and 26-55% as norfentanyl, taking around 3-4 days for 85% to eliminate. We're probably looking at 20+ ng/ml fentanyl when introduced on a conservative estimate. Pretty sure in terms of raw weight we're upgrading from "would kill a horse" to "would kill a blue whale".
At that point we're talking about a medical impossibility.