Advocates for George Floyd are setting themselves up in advance to wipe blood off their hands if and when former police officer Derek Chauvin is acquitted.
Al Sharpton and Floyd family attorney Benjamin Crump have made clear their position that anything short of a murder conviction will be a miscarriage of justice and still more proof that the judicial system is biased against blacks.
The media are naturally amplifying that narrative, just as they did throughout 2020. On Monday, the first day of Chauvin’s trial, CNN aired an hourlong press conference with Crump and Sharpton in its entirety, during which Crump referred to the now-famous video of Chauvin holding Floyd to the ground as a “torture video.” Crump and Sharpton both said the case for murder was “easy.” Then they led the crowd in a nearly nine-minute-long kneel, which CNN anchor Jim Sciutto called “moving.”
Don’t tell me this isn’t setting the country up for another Black Lives Matter rampage, which will make the summer of last year look like Coachella.
No, convicting Chauvin of murder will not be easy. It will be exceedingly difficult. If Crump and Sharpton were honest with their audience, hopes for getting a conviction would have bottomed out back in August, when police body camera footage was made public. It showed that the 6-foot-4-inch, 225-pound Floyd was tweaking, incoherent, and alarmingly erratic as police tried to subdue him and place him in a squad car.
Even before the video was out, the medical examiner’s report made a murder case a hard sell. The report showed that Floyd was in shockingly poor health, with a heart that was susceptible to failure under any amount of stress, let alone a run-in with police. It further showed that he had both methamphetamine and fentanyl in his blood.
And despite the hysteria made over Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, the examiner found no injuries to his neck or throat. Floyd said before he was on the ground that he couldn’t breathe. Moreover, he wasn’t suffocated. His heart simply gave out.
Floyd’s advocates point to a so-called “independent” medical report that disputes the original one, but that’s absurd. There is no “independent” medical report. There is only the state’s report and the report that Floyd’s family paid for.
Sharpton and Crump aren’t telling their followers the truth. The nation should prepare itself for an outcome that isn’t in the race-hustlers’ favor.
