Facts Don’t Matter, Not Even To The President

So, we had the Chauvin verdict.  Rather than seeing that verdict as justice served – a trial, a jury, a verdict – and time for healing, the President continued racial divisiveness by asserting that this is not over, and again proclaiming systemic racism and making other statements that sound more like anti-American propaganda than what should be coming from America’s President and from someone who continues to say he wants unity.

The Chauvin trial was not about race.   The prosecution did not mention race.  It was a murder trial plain and simple.  Yet, led by the President, the country ignores that fact and makes it about race and the Left’s current favorite cause:  eradicating the illusive systemic racism.

Now we have a police shooting in Ohio.  The 911 call included the words, “It's these grown girls over here trying to fight us, trying to stab us, get here now!"   A large teen girl holding a knife and attacking another teen was shot by police, thus saving the life of the teenager being attacked.  Sounds to me like it might be a police officer doing his job, protecting and serving.

What do we hear from the media, from the Left, and sadly from our President?    We first ignore the fact that the person shot was armed with a deadly weapon and in the process of using it against another human being.  NBC omitted the above words from the 911 call.   We ignore the fact that the officer saved someone from a violent and quite possibly deadly attack. 

What do we focus on?  The attacker whom the officer shot was Black.  So, that apparently makes it a racist and unjustifiable shooting no matter what the circumstances, proof of the alleged systemic racism that seems to now be the cause of any and everything that displeases the Left.

Did I (and others) not say that the Chauvin verdict was only the beginning?  The fact that, again led by our President, America misunderstood what a trial is and made the murder trial of Derek Chauvin instead some sort of trial of all of America has empowered the anti-police oratory.  The verdict which addressed the actions of one man is proclaimed by the President and others to be a verdict on America itself. 

Led by the President, much of America seems to think that verdict justifies anti-police rhetoric if not violence, as well as any number of statutes, rules, and regulations creating any number of actions that will allegedly rectify the “systemic racism” that they assert the Chauvin verdict proclaimed. 

This allows any member of the public to second guess a police officer’s actions in the heat of a violent and dangerous situation.  It allows the public to take bits and pieces of information about police action and use it to justify their narrative, even if the full factual picture does not support that narrative.  It means that any police officer who takes action that the mob, led by the President, does not like, is subject to condemnation by both the President and the mob. 

It means that any police officer now must not only be thinking about protecting the people he serves, but also be fearful that if the action he takes, even if justified, may result in threats and charges of murder against him.  And, led by the President, if that officer is charged with murder simply for doing his job it will be perfectly OK to threaten the jury via protests and rioting.

Contrary to the President and the mob beliefs, every action in this country is not about race.  It may be convenient to say that it is because it allows the President, the Left, and certain interest groups to push through their agendas claiming they are all about correcting systemic racism.  Anyone who opposes those agendas is simply disregarded as racist. 

The fact that there are more Whites than Blacks killed by police (both numerically and proportionately) or that some Black criminal offenders are killed by Black police officers are facts that don’t seem to matter.   The fact that some killing of Blacks by police are justifiable and happen in the course of the police officer carrying out his duties are facts that don’t matter.  The fact that many police shootings of Blacks have nothing to do with race but rather simply involve violations of criminal statutes or failure to obey police commands during a criminal stop are facts that don’t matter.  

We used to be a country that cared about Truth.  Facts are a part of Truth.  But now it seems we care not about Truth but Narrative.  Facts that do not fit a narrative are simply dismissed.   Any thought that is different from that approved by the President’s administration and the mob is dismissed.

Here is an apt description of our country today: “It is a system without an independent press; a system without an independent judiciary; where the people have no influence either on external or internal policy; where any thought which is different from the state is crushed.” 

Both sad and chilling is that the above quote comes from Alexander Solzhenitsyn describing Soviet Russia.   And so now you know where we are headed as we become a nation of narrative rather than facts.  

Another quote of relevance comes from Aldous Huxley: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”  You will recall that amongst the books authored by Huxley is Brave New World, another prescient view of where our elevation of narrative over fact is leading us.

Facts do matter.  Truth does matter.  And a President who is willing to ignore them, to choose to push a narrative even when that narrative is proven to be false, certainly does not have in mind or heart the best interests of the Country and Constitution he has sworn to protect.  And a country that allows this to happen, that simply falls into place as told, is in the process of destroying itself.

The Verdict

I am troubled by the Derek Chauvin verdict, though I will not second guess the jurors.  My concern is that the circus atmosphere of the trial puts our entire justice system at risk.

Let’s review a few facts about the circumstances surrounding and leading up to this trial which took place nearly a year after George Floyd’s death.  During that year we have had a continuing barrage of not just laments over Mr. Floyd’s death, but of Black deaths in general, and especially police shootings of Blacks.  There have been riots not only in Minneapolis, but across the country supportive of Black Lives Matter and Police Reform, Defunding of Police, and allegations of systemic racism in both policing and the justice system. 

The jurors, unless they were in a coma for the past year, had to have been subjected to the repeated assertions by the media that George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin and subjected to showings and re-showings of a short but ugliest portion of the video of the entire somewhat lengthy event and incidents surrounding Mr. Floyd’s death.

The jury for the trial, once selected, were not sequestered though they were cautioned not to listen to or read stories about the Chauvin trial.  Well, these jurors left their homes each day and traveled through streets with protestors and national guardsmen, went through heightened security at the courthouse each day, and traveled home again.  There is a 24-hour news cycle that blasts around us daily.  That news cycle had for the most part already tried and convicted Derick Chauvin of murder.  If those jurors were not aware of the threats of violence surrounding the case they were hearing, then again, they must have been in a coma.

They were not sequestered when new riots broke out over a different police shooting with more assertions of police racism.  They were not sequestered when pig’s blood was smeared on the former home of a Chauvin defense witness.  They were not sequestered when threats were made of riots and worse if the verdict was not guilty.  They were not sequestered when the city settled the Floyd family case for $27 million during the trial with the surrounding narrative that this must mean Chauvin is guilty.  And they were not sequestered when Rep. Waters uttered what was essentially a threat for the rioters to “become even more confrontational” if the jurors did not return a guilty verdict. 

The jurors were sequestered at the end of the trial for their deliberation, so they did not hear the President’s admonition that the evidence was overwhelming, and he prayed they would get the verdict right, nor did they hear the news of his call to the Floyd family to support them.  But by then they had heard enough. 

The jurors had significant but limited knowledge about the events before they became actual jurors.  They swore to render their verdict only on the law and the evidence presented at the trial.  Much new evidence came out at trial that the media had not shared – evidence that might raise reasonable doubts about the narrative.  But was it, after a year of daily hearing the media’s narrative, too late to look at new and contrary evidence objectively?  Was it too late to honestly determine there might be reasonable doubt about that narrative?  We don’t know, and perhaps even the jurors themselves don’t know.

Was the threat of violence to their city, their hometown, even their own homes and their families a factor in the jurors’ deliberations?  We don’t know and they may not really know that either.

And that is the problem.  This trial was turned into some sort of proceeding on the state of social justice in America.  But a trial is not about a concept or a cause.  A trial is about a very specific incident and the facts and law that are exclusively relevant to that incident.  When one tries to make a trial about something else then those involved in that trial’s proceedings do not get justice.  And the irony here is that if you don’t have justice then you can’t have social justice.

We know that the jurors were bombarded with publicity that included information, misinformation, and disinformation about George Floyd and his death for close to a year before the trial began and that the publicity continued to surround them throughout the trial.  We know that they deliberated for only 10 and a half hours which did not provide much time to review three weeks’ worth of evidence and to make sure they were looking only at that evidence and not the year’s publicity. 

We know that despite the complexity of the laws involved and legal interpretations of terms therein, that the jurors asked no questions of the Judge during their 10 and a half hours of deliberation.  We know that it took the jury only 10 and a half hours to elect a foreperson, to review the law and evidence, and render unanimous guilty verdict on 3 counts, all requiring different criteria be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

As I said at the start, I will not second guess the jurors, but it is hard to have the confidence in this verdict that I usually have in jury verdicts.  My experience as a lawyer and a legal observer has generally been that jurors try their best to follow the law and the facts and reach a fair verdict and I will trust that is what the Chauvin jurors did.  But was that possible given the circus that surrounded them for the year prior to and then during this trial?  We will likely never know the definitive answer to that question. 

And that is why this is so troubling.

Because, if you cannot fully trust our legal and especially our jury system, then you cannot trust the law.  And if it even appears that a jury can be swayed by media narrative or by threats of violence then that is what we can look forward to in future litigation.

When we look again at the specific defendant in this trial, there is more to trouble us.  Derek Chauvin is a police officer.  I know that he is entitled to a jury of his peers, and apparently the lawyers and the court were satisfied with the jury, but I don’t know if there was even one police officer on the jury.  I do know that defendants who happen to fall within certain identity groups often demand that their juries consist of members of that same identity group.

The fact that this was the trial that resulted due to actions of a police officer during a criminal stop and detention means that the verdict here will have ramifications that will affect police behavior in the future, especially if there is the possibility or perception that this was not a just verdict.  If police feel that whenever someone is injured during a difficult arrest that they can be tried, possibly unfairly, then they will hold back on some actions that are necessary for them to do their job and keep the people of their jurisdictions safe.  This does not serve any of us well.

The ramifications of this verdict will also resonate with the social justice warriors.  We already have assertions that this trial has proven that systemic racism exists.  Just a note:  this was the trial of one police officer for one action; it was not the trial of whether or not systemic racism exists.  Yet apparently those calling for remaking or removal of police generally, see this verdict as a hefty bonus to their cause. 

Many believe that their demonstrations, rioting, and threats of violence are what resulted in this verdict.  Even the President suggests that it was the people coming to the streets that gave us this verdict (of which he approves).  Essentially this is a belief that the mob, not justice, won.  President Biden now calls on the country to continue to “listen to the activists” who have protested about police brutality since George Floyd’s death.  

But this was a trial.  It was not a judgement about the message of activists. Activists have their role.  But that role does not include swaying a jury trial.  Indeed, attempts to do that are usually considered to be jury tampering and subject to severe penalties.  Yet when even our President, with his encouragement of following narrative not fact, shows us that he does not understand the separate roles of activist and  juror, then we can certainly expect more demand for mob rule and less respect or support for the rule of law.

There were only 12 jurors at the Derek Chauvin trial, and I was not one of them.  Nor was the media or the President.  I did watch parts of the trial and I am left with some reasonable doubt.  The jurors have told us there is no such doubt and we must respect that verdict.  But no matter how seriously those jurors took their oaths of objectivity and to follow only the law and evidence presented at trial, given the year long circus leading up to and surrounding this trial, I question whether it could ever have been fair.

I will always wonder if Derek Chauvin was truly guilty of the crimes charged or if he was simply the sacrificial lamb that had to be slaughtered to assuage the guilt for the systemic racism that allegedly exists.  But anyone who thinks that with this verdict the anger and violence, the hatred and claims of racism will end is dreaming.  My fear is that this verdict will add to increased belief in and reliance on mob rule while justice and the rule of law become the ultimate victims.