The attorney for George Floyd’s family argued the police officer who kneeled on the unarmed black man’s neck for more than eight minutes should be charged with first-degree murder.
The Minnesota officer, Derek Chauvin, has been charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter after video of Floyd’s arrest sparked unrest across the country. The criminal complaint, citing an autopsy, said Floyd did not die from strangulation but underlying health conditions, including heart disease and hypertension.
However, Benjamin Crump, the Floyd family attorney, argued Floyd’s death was premeditated because of how long the officer kept his knee on Floyd’s neck.
“We think that he had intent based on not the one-minute, two-minute, but over eight minutes, almost nine minutes, he kept his knee in a man’s neck that was begging and pleading for breath,” Crump told CBS’s Face The Nation on Sunday.
“We now have the audio from the police bodycam, and we hear where one officer says, ‘He doesn’t have a pulse. Maybe we should turn him on his side.’ But yet officer Chauvin says, ‘No, we’re going to keep him in this position.’ That’s intent, Margaret,” he said. “Also, the fact that officer Chauvin kept his knee on his neck for almost three minutes after he was unconscious. We don’t understand how that is not first-degree murder.”
Crump added that the pair worked at the same bar at one point when “Chauvin was an off-duty police officer while George Floyd was a security guard. So they had to overlap.”
“And so that is going to be an interesting aspect to this case, and hopefully upgrading these charges to first-degree murder because we believe he knew who George Floyd was,” he said.
Floyd’s encounter with police on Monday began with a report of a counterfeit $20 bill that he allegedly tried to use to buy cigarettes. In a video of the incident, Floyd is pinned to the ground and repeatedly telling Chauvin he can’t breathe.
