It’s been roughly five years since George Floyd’s death, which led to prosecutions that sent Derek Chauvin and his fellow officers to prison for alleged homicide and civil rights violations related to that death—and five years is always a good time for a retrospective when hindsight is aided by information revealed during that time.
In my opinion, as a career emergency physician, based on the videos showing events leading to Floyd’s death and the autopsy report, Floyd’s death was not a homicide. Instead, he died suddenly while resisting arrest because he had a cardiac arrest, just as would happen to a man with a bad heart exerting himself while shoveling snow.
Andrew Baker, Hennepin County’s medical examiner, wrote in the original autopsy report that Floyd showed “no life threatening injuries.” In almost all cases, a sudden death with no injuries means a cardiac arrest, as any pathologist knows. Given that the autopsy also showed severe heart disease, it was always suspicious that Baker referred to neck compression and failed to declare the cause of death that was most reasonable based on the autopsy results.
Many conservatives argued that Floyd died from the fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system, but the blood levels of 11 and 19 nanograms, respectively, his fentanyl habit makes the fentanyl level too low to support death from an overdose, and his behavior also contradicts a fentanyl overdose. Those who die from fentanyl fall asleep and stop breathing. He was active and awake. Meth is a stimulant and can increase the risk of cardiac irritation and arrest, but deaths due to meth overdoses are in the hundreds or thousands of nanograms.
Ignoring Floyd’s heart disease, his wild exertions, and even the drugs (whatever effect they may have had), the coroner included in the “title” to the autopsy neck compression and never stated a cause of death that was most likely--heart rhythm lethal disturbance from exertion and a bad heart.
Alpha News used the five-year anniversary of Floyd’s death to look at the many flaws in the cases made against the arresting officers, and it provides some helpful information in that regard, all casting doubt on the validity of the officers’ prosecutions.
The first video notes that representatives of the Minneapolis police department testified under oath during Chauvin’s trial that the police department did not sanction the restraint he used. In fact, as this movie and this book compellingly prove, Chauvin complied precisely with police department training. Police officers, their unions, and their defense attorneys knew this to be true but kept silent.
I knew immediately that Chauvin’s actions could not have led to Floyd’s death because I knew the vital structures of the neck are the trachea (windpipe) and two major carotid arteries on both sides of the trachea. Neck pressure from the back does not compress and obstruct them. Instead, as the training Chauvin and his colleagues received implicitly acknowledged, the restraint was safe and appropriate, both for the suspect and the police.To prove this point, I created an experiment showing two corrections officers who matched Chauvin’s and Floyd’s sizes, replicating the hold Chauvin used on Floyd. That hold could have lasted indefinitely without any harm to the prone volunteer, as confirmed by constant monitoring with a pulse oximeter. However, when I offered my services to defense counsel Eric Nelson, he would not respond to my offers. Later, when I spoke to Chauvin after he was imprisoned, he told me that he pleaded with Nelson to demonstrate the restraint, but Nelson refused.
In December 2023 and February 2024, I repeated the demonstration, but I exaggerated the conditions to emphasize my point. I had an experienced 6’4”, 220-pound police officer restrain me (5’9’ 160 lbs) for 10 minutes. The pulse oximeter showed that my oxygen level never dropped below the normal 95 % saturation,
In late 2024, Minneapolis Police Department training supervisor Katie Blackwell, who had testified at trial that Chauvin and the other officers used a restraint not approved by the MPD. sued Alpha News, Liz Collins, and Dr. J.C. Chaix, who produced the film Fall of Minneapolis, for defamation. Defense counsel Chris Madel recruited 30 present or former Minneapolis police officers to testify or sign affidavits that the restraint Chauvin used was consistent with department policy and training.
The court dismissed the lawsuit, finding in relevant part that the defendants were making “substantially true” statements when they said:
∙ “...it doesn’t seem like Inspector Blackwell knows how MPD officers are trained—or maybe she was lying.”
∙ “With that in mind, it doesn’t seem like Blackwell, Arradondo, Mercil, and other so-called expert witnesses were telling the truth.”
∙ “It seems more like they were lying by omission, if not lying outright.”
As regards each statement, the court held that the statements were not actionable because “(1) they accurately reflect the gist of the available record; (2) they are supported by MPD policies, training materials, and sworn officer declarations; and (3) they use qualifying, rhetorical language that marks them as opinions or interpretations—not provable falsehoods.”
These findings should serve as the basis for reversing the judgments against all four officers.
It’s been years now since the officers were convicted, and some (not Chauvin, whose sentence is 20-plus years) are completing their prison terms, so the appeals process is pretty much a dead-end, but there is always hope. Ben Shapiro and others are pushing for Derek Chauvin to receive a federal pardon from Donald Trump.
What really needs to be done, though, is for the Department of Justice to review the entire case and indict everyone involved at every level who knowingly participated in denying the four police officers their due process rights. That action might serve to force Chauvin’s case to be reopened, getting him out of prison, and clearing the records of all of the officers—and of course, entitling them to vast compensation for their suffering.
