Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is appealing his conviction for murder in the killing of George Floyd, arguing that jurors were intimidated by the protests that followed and prejudiced by heavy pretrial publicity.
Chauvin’s lawyers submitted the appeal with Minnesota’s Court of Appeals on Monday asking to either overturn the conviction, order a retrial in another venue, or reduce his sentence because of alleged “misconduct.”
“The overwhelming media coverage exposed the jurors – literally every day – to news demonising Chauvin and glorifying Floyd, which was more than sufficient to presume prejudice,” the lawyers wrote alleged.
The document also outlined a number of alleged instances of prosecutor misconduct and said Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, was not fairly tried because he could not review evidence.
That apparently included “approximately 75 per cent of pdf documents [that] were not computer searchable,” which forced his attorney Eric Nelson to “go through a time-consuming process of converting and reconverting files to make them searchable,” the document said.
The original trial proceedings in April 2021 were also labelled as being “so pervaded by error, misconduct and prejudice that they were structurally defective.”
Chauvin’s lawyers also criticized the court for allegedly representing an “extreme” threat of violence to Chauvin, despite it being patrolled by the National Guard and fences.
If the conviction is upheld, the appeal filing says, the court should reduce Chauvin’s sentence to be within the state’s sentencing guidelines. Chauvin was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison, which exceeded Minnesota’s sentencing guideline range of 10 years and eight months to 15 years.
At the time of sentencing, Judge Peter Cahill wrote in a memorandum that the case warranted a harsher sentence because Chauvin “abused his position of trust and authority” and treated Floyd “without respect and denied him the dignity owed to all human beings.”
