George Floyd’s Death: How Should the Jury Decide the Charges against Derek Chauvin?

It all comes down to intent.

]On Monday morning, the prosecution and defense will sum up to the jury in the murder trial of fired Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for allegedly causing the death of George Floyd last Memorial Day. Minneapolis is on tenterhooks, as are other major cities across the country, because it is inevitable that the radical Left will riot. If Chauvin is convicted of murder, the rioting will be portrayed as an affirmation that the nation’s police are hunting down young black men. If Chauvin is acquitted, or even if he is “merely” convicted of manslaughter (a felony carrying up to ten years’ imprisonment), the rioting will probably be more intense, because of what will be portrayed as systemically racist America’s denial that it is systemically racist.

It is an awful thing for the country when justice stops being justice, when it is perverted into a racialized morality play. There can be no coexistence of justice and “social justice.” The latter denies what is essential to a judicial system that aspires to actual justice in criminal cases: the unstinting principle that guilt is individual.

We don’t hold children liable for the sins of their parents, and we don’t hold members of a tribe, institution, community, nation, or race responsible for the crimes committed by their members. We hold the individual person accountable for his or her own crime, only if the state proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt on each essential element of the offense or offenses charged.

It would be wrong to find Derek Chauvin guilty just because he was a cop, because he is white, because the deceased was a relatively young black man, or because — combining all these promiscuous considerations — Chauvin’s guilt would serve a narrative popular among progressives predominant in politics, pop culture, punditry, and the press. And as scandalous as such a guilty verdict would be, what would be even more reprehensible — what should be unacceptable in this country — would be a guilty verdict induced by jury intimidation.