Judge instructs jury ahead of closing arguments in Derek Chauvin murder trial

Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill began instructing jurors on Monday before they heard closing arguments and begin deliberating on whether the way former Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of a dying George Floyd in last year's arrest was murder.

Prosecutors have told the jury they are weighing the guilt of only one man, but their verdict will nonetheless be widely seen as a reckoning in the way the United States polices Black people.

Chauvin, who is white, pushed his knee into the neck of Floyd, a 46-year-old handcuffed Black man, for more than nine minutes on May 25, 2020, outside the grocery store that had accused Floyd of using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes.

A bystander's video of Floyd begging for his life before falling limp scandalized people around the world. An image of Floyd's face has since been elevated to an icon for the largest protest movement in the United States in decades.

The Hennepin County chief medical examiner ruled Floyd's death a homicide at the hands of the police.

Prosecutors from the Minnesota attorney general's office say Chauvin used unreasonable, and therefore illegal, force in compressing Floyd's neck and torso against the road in a way that starved him of oxygen.

Chauvin's lawyers argued that he correctly followed the training he received over 19 years with the Minneapolis Police Department, which fired him the day after Floyd's arrest, and sought to raise doubts about the cause of Floyd's death.