In this week’s edition of “That’s not what happened!” we’re going to look at a column by the Washington Post‘s Radley Balko, who, much like the rest of the media, appears to be not actually following the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, despite having a lot of opinions about its developments.
Balko wrote Tuesday that Chauvin’s defense team, which consists of one lawyer named Eric Nelson, is putting itself in jeopardy by embracing the notion of “excited delirium.”
The term generally refers to an extreme state of distress, panic, or hysteria in a person who either has a mental health condition or has ingested illicit drugs. Chauvin and at least one other officer had discussed the possibility that George Floyd was experiencing or might experience excited delirium when they had subdued him on the ground.
Balko wrote first that excited delirium isn’t even necessarily a real thing, because it “isn’t recognized by the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association or the American Psychiatric Association.” That’s true, but it is recognized by the National Association of Medical Examiners, which has said that the condition can be identified when a person taken into police custody is “acting erratically due to a severe mental illness and/or acute drug intoxication.” NAME has further noted that “it is not uncommon” for such a person “to die during or soon after restraint and/or altercation with law enforcement.” Excited delirium is also recognized by the American College of Emergency Physicians as a “formal diagnosis.”
Balko’s skepticism of excited delirium aside, he wrote that if the defense were to argue that Floyd eventually died from the condition, it would merely be “a justification for what otherwise might look like excessive force, and impunity when that force coincides with a suspect’s death.”
But Balko is just wrong here — that’s not what the defense is arguing. The defense is arguing that if Chauvin believed Floyd was in a state of excited delirium, or that it might befall him, it was reasonable to keep him restrained on the ground in order to control his movement, especially considering Floyd’s large size and that he had been resisting arrest. The point isn’t that Floyd died because of excited delirium — it’s that Chauvin’s awareness of this condition factored into his own decision to keep Floyd on the ground, on his chest and stomach, and with some force.
Balko wrote that if Chauvin and the other officers suspected Floyd might be experiencing excited delirium during that fateful encounter of May 2020, then “once Floyd was nonresponsive Chauvin was more obligated to remove his knee and administer CPR, because he would have been trained to know Floyd had an elevated risk of death.”
That’s a wild assumption for someone so skeptical that excited delirium is even real. If it’s not real, why would Chauvin or anyone else be expected to give Floyd medical attention?
But assuming it is real, excited delirium would provide a justification for an officer to make sure that a suspect who is possibly experiencing it is kept under tight control, for his own safety and that of the arresting officers.
There is otherwise no testimony from either the defense or the prosecution that EMS had not been called already to provide care for Floyd. True, Chauvin or any other officer could have started chest compressions, but even the prosecution’s expert witnesses testified that during an arrest, medical attention is a secondary consideration after the restraint of the suspect and getting control of the scene. (Anyone who has seen the multiple videos of the scene can see that it was almost at no point ever really under control.)
“Excited delirium” is not being posited as a cause of Floyd’s death, but as a reason Chauvin restrained Floyd as he did. The defense will point to Floyd’s cause of death based on testimony from the only person to have performed an autopsy on Floyd — it was the result of a heart attack induced by drugs, a history of cardiac illness, and the stress Floyd experienced during his interaction with police.
Neither Chauvin nor any of the other officers on that day had any idea that Floyd suffered from, as the medical examiner put it, “severe” heart disease.
Balko didn’t provide an accurate representation of the defense’s case. Like so many in the media, he is writing about something that didn’t happen.
