3 Former Officers Are Convicted of Violating George Floyd’s Civil Rights

 

Three former Minneapolis police officers were found guilty on Thursday of federal crimes for failing to intervene as another officer killed George Floyd by pressing his knee on his neck for more than nine minutes.

The case was an extraordinarily rare example of the Justice Department prosecuting officers for their inaction while another officer used excessive force. The verdicts signal to police departments across America that juries may become more willing to convict not just officers who kill people on the job, but also those who watch them do it.

A federal jury determined that the officers — Tou Thao, 36; J. Alexander Kueng, 28; and Thomas Lane, 38 — had willfully violated Mr. Floyd’s constitutional rights by not providing medical care when he lost a pulse and that two of them were also guilty of not intervening to stop a fellow officer, Derek Chauvin, from planting his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck.

Mr. Kueng and Mr. Lane both helped Mr. Chauvin restrain Mr. Floyd while he was handcuffed facedown on the pavement. Mr. Thao stood nearby, keeping bystanders away. Mr. Chauvin was convicted of murder last year and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison.

The verdicts represented a significant victory for the Justice Department, which under the Biden administration has pledged to be more aggressive in prosecuting civil rights violations. It came days after federal prosecutors secured hate crimes convictions against three white men in Georgia for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man whom they chased and killed.

Judge Paul A. Magnuson said he would allow the three men to remain free on bond until their sentencing hearing, which has not yet been scheduled. Mr. Lane and his lawyer shook their heads as the judge read the guilty verdicts; the other two defendants had no visible reaction. All three men and their lawyers were escorted from the courtroom by a U.S. marshal.

Judge Magnuson has wide latitude to impose a penalty and could sentence the officers to any amount of prison time, including life. They still face state charges of aiding and abetting murder, with a trial scheduled for this year. Federal prosecutors had charged Mr. Chauvin along with the other three officers, but he reached a plea agreement with the Justice Department in December under which prosecutors said they would seek a 25-year prison sentence.

Mr. Floyd’s relatives hailed Thursday’s verdict.

“I’m starting to feel like I can breathe again,” said Philonise Floyd, a brother of George Floyd’s.

The former Minneapolis police officers Tou Thao, left, and Alexander Kueng last month. Mr. Thao, Mr. Kueng and Thomas Lane were convicted of federal crimes.Credit...Kerem Yucel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

He and Brandon Williams, George Floyd’s nephew, said in the courthouse after the verdict that they hoped Judge Magnuson would sentence all three officers to the maximum possible prison term.

Legal experts and racial justice activists had been closely watching the case, saying it could have more ramifications for policing than even Mr. Chauvin’s murder convictions. At the heart of this case was a more widespread problem, experts say, than a single officer’s act of violence: the tendency of officers to stand by when they witness a fellow officer committing a crime.

The jurors’ decision, which came after about 13 hours of deliberations following a monthlong trial, suggested that they agreed with the prosecution’s arguments that the officers knew in the moment that Mr. Floyd was in severe medical distress and that Mr. Chauvin was breaking the law. The verdict was also a rejection of the argument cited in each of the three defense cases: that the officers trusted Mr. Chauvin, the senior officer on the scene, and therefore were not aware that what he was doing was illegal.

This case is believed to be the first time the federal government has charged police officers for failing to intervene against a more senior officer who was using excessive force, according to Christy E. Lopez, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. She has worked with police departments on training officers about their constitutional duties to step in when they see colleagues breaking the law.

She said the guilty verdicts could significantly change law enforcement culture, compelling agencies to make sure that officers are properly trained and are upholding their duties.

“It forces you to move beyond the bad apple narrative,” Ms. Lopez said. She added, “Now you’re like, ‘Oh, everyone on the scene played a role in this.’ It shifts the entire narrative from misconduct being about just acts of commission to misconduct also being about acts of omission.”

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said the verdict showed that the officers had violated the Constitution by not intervening.

“The Justice Department will continue to seek accountability for law enforcement officers whose actions, or failure to act, violate their constitutional duty to protect the civil rights of our citizens,” Mr. Garland said in a statement. “George Floyd should be alive today.”

During the trial, the defense lawyers tried to absolve the three officers, with Robert Paule, who represents Mr. Thao, telling the jury during his closing statement that “Just because something has a tragic ending does not mean it’s a crime.”

As Mr. Floyd was being killed, Mr. Thao, a veteran officer who was Mr. Chauvin’s partner, was keeping a crowd of bystanders at bay. Mr. Lane and Mr. Kueng, both rookies, were helping Mr. Chauvin detain Mr. Floyd after a convenience store clerk said he had used a fake $20 bill to buy cigarettes.

Activists marched in Minneapolis last year after Derek Chauvin was sentenced for a murder conviction.Credit...

All three officers, who along with Mr. Chauvin were fired a day after the killing, were charged with one count of failing to provide medical aid. Mr. Kueng and Mr. Thao were also charged with failing to intervene and stop Mr. Chauvin’s use of force; Mr. Lane, who twice asked Mr. Chauvin if they should roll Mr. Floyd on his side so he could more easily breathe, did not face that charge.

The 12 jurors who decided the case were drawn from across Minnesota because the trial was over federal crimes, and all 12 appeared to be white. That was in contrast to the more racially diverse juries, drawn from the Minneapolis area, that convicted Mr. Chauvin and Kimberly Potter, the white officer in a Minneapolis suburb who shot and killed a Black man after mistakenly drawing her gun instead of her Taser during a traffic stop.

During this trial, prosecutors called to the witness stand doctors, police officers, bystanders and the paramedic who arrived on the scene and said he believed that Mr. Floyd was already dead. Prosecutors relied on the mountains of video evidence — from bystanders, from the officers’ body-worn cameras, from city surveillance cameras — that provided an excruciating second-by-second record of the killing.

One of the most important witnesses was Inspector Katie Blackwell, a Minneapolis police official who formerly was in charge of training. She testified for three days about the training that recruits receive on properly using force and on their constitutional duty to intervene when they see other officers using excessive force.

But the defense lawyers attacked Inspector Blackwell, arguing that the department failed in training officers to recognize when they have a duty to intervene, saying the discussion was perfunctory and “little more than a word on a PowerPoint.”

While cross-examining her, Thomas Plunkett, the lawyer for Mr. Kueng, played the audio of a fiery speech Al Pacino gave while playing a football coach in the movie “Any Given Sunday,” a clip that was played for recruits at the police academy. Mr. Plunkett said his point was that the department promoted a “cops versus the world” mentality.

The defense also tried to focus the jury’s attention on the hierarchical and paramilitary aspects of police culture — how recruits are taught to obey superiors and carry out orders without question.

Unlike Mr. Chauvin, who did not testify at his trial, each of the three officers took the stand in his own defense. They all said that they believed that Mr. Chauvin, as the senior officer, was in charge and knew what he was doing, and that they did not recognize that Mr. Floyd was in the throes of a medical emergency.

“I think I would trust a 19-year veteran to figure it out,” Mr. Thao said. Mr. Kueng, who had Mr. Chauvin as one of his field training officers, said, “He was my senior officer, and I trusted his advice.”

To simplify things for the jury, the prosecutors often used the phrase “in your custody, in your care” to describe the duty that officers have to protect a detained suspect. In Mr. Chauvin’s trial last year, prosecutors similarly condensed their case for the jurors to the slogan “believe your eyes,” arguing it was as simple as what they had seen in the harrowing bystander video.

That video emerged from a group of ordinary citizens, young and old, who by circumstance found themselves witnessing a murder outside a convenience store in South Minneapolis almost two years ago.

Among them was Darnella Frazier, a teenager who was buying snacks with her young cousin and took out her cellphone to film the officers struggling on the ground with Mr. Floyd. Her video was the one that went viral, ricocheting around the world and drawing millions to the streets to protest police brutality and racial injustice.

George Perry Floyd, 46, was a Black security guard and onetime rapper who had lost his job in the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Chauvin and Mr. Lane are white, Mr. Thao is Asian American and Mr. Kueng is Black.

Throughout the trial, defense lawyers argued that members of the crowd, who over and over told the officers that they were killing Mr. Floyd and that he was struggling to breathe, were distracting to the officers, and possibly threatening.

But prosecutors tried to portray the actions of the onlookers as a powerful counterpoint to what the officers were doing — arguing that if a small crowd of average citizens could see clearly that Mr. Floyd was facing a dire medical emergency, then three well-trained police officers surely should have.

“You just need plain old common sense,” Manda Sertich, a prosecutor, told the jury in her closing argument. “And you just need plain old human decency.”

The trial and its outcome were yet another milestone in nearly two years of upheaval and trauma for the Twin Cities area, with a seemingly endless number of overlapping crises centered on the combustible issues of police brutality and racial injustice.

Ms. Potter’s fatal shooting of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old man driving to get his car washed, took place as Mr. Chauvin was on trial last April. During this month’s trial, a Minneapolis officer fatally shot and killed Amir Locke, a Black man, as the police carried out a no-knock raid. The killing plunged the city further into turmoil, with more protests and calls for the mayor to resign.

During the four weeks of the trial, family members of Mr. Floyd and his girlfriend, Courteney Ross, who testified at Mr. Chauvin’s trial, were frequently seen in the court’s gallery.

The trial of Mr. Kueng, Mr. Lane and Mr. Thao on state charges of aiding and abetting murder is scheduled for June. During their federal trial this week, state prosecutors who secured Mr. Chauvin’s conviction and are in charge of the state case against the other three officers, were spotted in the audience, taking notes.