Pretty much the world knows the circumstances. 8:46. Counter arguments state 8:15. As if the precise elapsed time from Chauvin’s down presser knee to George Floyd’s tortured death is pertinent, that the 30 second error somehow mitigates the outcome of death by police (as if relevant, sources now say more than 9 minutes).
Perhaps, with a deeper perusal of the available video, a reporter or two, covering for sides staunchly supporting brutal responses to any activity construed as illegal-willfully oblivious to deadly circumventions of the principal of presumption of innocence-will perhaps note, in Chauvin’s defence, that at the 1:49 mark his eyes tracked to a butterfly passing and became so entranced that he lost touch with what his knee was doing. Perhaps a Red Spotted Purple or an Aphrodite Fritillary? On a funny note…
Will Derek Chauvin get off? My gut says, yes. Not completely but yes. Maybe a lesser sentence followed by staged moments of media remorse, a restrained, “justice is served” pageant (including footage of a van carting Chauvin to a detention facility) ending with a short but ubiquitous reminder of his family’s 27 million dollar settlement and America moving forward through God’s love (cue Black preachers), then on to the next story. A year or two or five later Chauvin is on the street, paroled because…or maybe things have changed…I mean, maybe?
If a country’s legal system, its ideology of justice vaults pugnaciously from a justification of genocide, theft and enslavement what justice will the decedents of the genocided, the ghettoized, those cordoned off in pockets of destitution, be served? If the founding values of the country are matrixed in the glorification of acts of savagery as brutal as any cycling down the toilet of human horror shows, umbrella-ed by the rhetoric of 17-18 Century, blinkered pontificators of Enlightenment, what presentment of justice will follow?
What this trial, and so many of those preceding it, marks is the place a fractured nation state, scotch taped with an origin story of race supremacy and sustained by fits of transcendent violence, has come. Will the executors of American justice attempt a compromise on a hitherto evangelical adherence to a rotting race narrative and furtively attempt to navigate adamant shoals of nurtured division? Or will it exhale, damn the consequences and faith-fall into that shunned greatest promise sermonized by vilified and sainted dreamers? Or has the butterfly’s wings flapped long, long ago? Who can say? Certainly not I.