Nobody who isn’t a completely blinded ideologue would pretend that Derek Chauvin got anything like a fair trial.
From the state calling out an army of lawyers to face off against a lone public defender, to the choice of venue, to the Klan-like tactic of militants parading outside the courthouse and rioting to send home an explicit message to the judge and jury, everything about the case was a colour-inverted re-run of a Jim Crow-era legalised lynching.
With an appeal certain, yet another piece of evidence has emerged as to just how stacked the trial really was.
A report from The Post Millenial Sunday revealed that at least one of the jurors who convicted the former Minneapolis police officer for the murder of George Floyd may have come to the jury pool armed with an agenda and possibly an assumption of guilt.
The fact that the jurors can even be identified in itself inevitably tainted the trial: witnesses’ houses were attacked and Democrat politicians made clear that violence would follow any “wrong” jury decision.
But jurors are supposed to be impartial. As the new revelations show, that was very far from the case.
Brandon Mitchell, previously only known as Juror #52, denied having relevant knowledge of Floyd’s civil case during jury selection in March.
But a social media post recently unearthed from seven months earlier showed him wearing a “Black Lives Matter” hat and a t-shirt emblazoned with the message “Get your knee off our necks” — a reference to the manner of Floyd’s death — and “BLM.”
“Juror #52” may also have misled the court during jury selection.
“Judge Cahill asked Juror #52, whether he heard anything about the #GeorgeFloyd civil case,” [Paul Blume] wrote March 15.
“He says, no. He explained hearing some basic info about trial dates, etc from the news in recent months, but nothing that would keep him from serving as impartial juror,” he said[…]
Mitchell has spoken since the trial about serving as a juror as a way to “spark some change” and talked about not watching the Floyd video in its entirety beforehand because he didn’t want to see “a black man being killed” — sentiments that hardly convey impartiality.
Not only does Mitchell appear to have not been as impartial as he claimed, he also apparently had an agenda.
The most definitive statement came later, however, when spoke about how he viewed his role as a juror in the first place.
“I mean it’s important if we wanna see some change, we wanna see some things going different, we gotta get out there, get into these avenues, get into these rooms to try to spark some change,” he said.
“Jury duty is one of those things. Jury duty. Voting. All of those things are things we gotta do.”
World News Daily
But that’s not what jury duty is about. Jury duty is not about pushing ideological agendas. Jurors are responsible for listening to a dispute, evaluating the evidence presented, deciding on the facts, and making a decision in accordance with the rules of law.
If, as seems clear, that didn’t happen, then Chauvin’s grounds for appeal just keep piling up.
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