Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that former police officer Derek Chauvin should be charged with first-degree murder if medical officials conclude George Floyd died by asphyxiation.
Giuliani, who is also President Trump’s personal attorney, reacted Monday to the video of Floyd’s death and weighed in on the charges against the officer who pinned him.
“Here’s the problem. The problem is the autopsy. If the autopsy says he died of asphyxiation, then [the charge] should be murder one,” Giuliani said during an interview with Fox News. “If the autopsy says he died of a heart attack, then we have a little bit more of a problem because they are going to argue that the officer didn’t kill him, the heart attack killed him.”
The preliminary results of Floyd’s official autopsy found “no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation,” but the results of an independent autopsy released Monday concluded his death was “homicide caused by asphyxia due to neck and back compression that led to a lack of blood flow to the brain.”
Chauvin has been charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter, charges that Floyd’s family said they wish would be upgraded to first-degree murder.
“That becomes a very, very intricate legal argument. And you might end up seeing this case as an attempted murder case,” Giuliani continued. “I’ll tell you why it’s murder one, those things go from three, two, one — murder and attempted murder. Based on intent. He had that man down there for about eight minutes. I counted five times he was warned that he might be killing him. That’s a lot of warning, that’s a lot of intent.”
“Every single time he was told, ‘He is not breathing,’ he had a chance to reflect and decide, ‘Am I going to continue to have him not breathing, which means you’re going to die, or am I going to stop?’ Four, five times, he made the decision to do that. That’s a lot of intent, that’s just as good as premeditation the day before. And I think it was a very weak charge … and you never start weak, you start at the top,” he added.
Also during the interview, Giuliani roundly criticized officials for what he characterized as an improper handling and weak response to the protests and riots that have broken out in Minneapolis and across the country in response to Floyd’s death.
“The first person who throws a brick gets arrested. The second person, then the third one, then the fourth one, and it goes away,” he said.
