The prosecution team was also worried the case might be moved out of Hennepin County so they conducted a mock trial with Stearns County residents. "For all the buildup and worry, things went well," Ellison said, adding that Baker stuck with his determination that Floyd had died by homicide.
To many, the comment was "just one of the first signs of the old pattern repeating itself: unarmed African-Americans being killed in custody while the system protected the officers from accountability."īaker also said that he didn't believe the prone position was any more dangerous than other restraints and couldn't attribute the death to positional asphyxia.īecause of concerns about Baker's testimony, prosecutors sandwiched his appearance between other experts.Įllison said he didn't sleep the night before Baker testified, worried he would go rogue and demolish the case against Chauvin. In the summer of 2020, Baker said, that if Floyd "were found dead at home alone and with no other apparent cause, this could be acceptable to call an overdose."Įllison called Baker's comment "a gratuitous, unnecessary unscientific statement and he had me scared to death." The book also detailed his concerns with Hennepin County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker's testimony. He didn't use the book to settle scores and had mostly generous observations about others, including the defense attorneys for Chauvin and the other three officers. Ellison's recounting is even-handed and informative. The trial in March and April 2021 was live streamed to the world, so the characters in the book will be familiar to those who tracked it. They're very different so you need some resources to get a grip on that." "These cases are not like your average criminal case. "Tragically, this is probably going to happen again," he said in an interview. He wrote the book, he said, as a guide for the next police brutality case. MINNEAPOLIS - In a new book "Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence," Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison pulls back the curtain on the massive effort behind the pandemic-era prosecution of ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.įrom the morning on the edge of his bed when he first saw the bystander video of Floyd's in-custody murder on Memorial Day 2020, Ellison takes the reader through the work of assembling the trial team, bringing in consultants to help with jury selection and finding witnesses - through to the verdict and aftermath.Īs horrific as the video was for most, Ellison explains how the guilty verdict was far from certainty.
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