In Trial Of Derek Chauvin, America Is On Trial And The Plaintiff Is Humanity
By Biodun Jeyifo
As I write this column very early in the morning of Friday, April 9, 2021, we are only in the nineth day of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the White Minneapolis policeman whose killing of Gorge Floyd in a chokehold was caught on video and startled the whole world. Yes, we are only in the second week of the trial that will last for several weeks, if not for months and already it is clear that the plaintiff has won a resounding moral and spiritual victory and nothing will ever be the same again.
In a formal technical sense, this plaintiff is the American government, but everyone knows that the real plaintiff is humanity itself. More specifically, humanity in this instance is embodied in and by all the witnesses so far presented by the government prosecutors, most especially two completely unlikely pair of heroes, Darnella Frazier and Dr. Martin Tobin. Ms. Frazier is the teenage girl who shot the video of Chauvin’s slow and satanic killing of Floyd by placing the whole weight of his body on Floyd’s neck through one of his knees. And Dr. Tobin is the pulmonologist who, yesterday, used Ms. Frazier’s video to give stunning forensic evidence that it was “lack of oxygen” caused by Chauvin that killed George Floyd. Why do I claim that humanity itself is the plaintiff in this trial and, secondly, why do I claim that humanity’s representative in the trial are Ms. Frazier and Dr. Tobin?
During her testimony at Chauvin’s trial, Darnella essentially said two things. First, she said that she is Black, that her father is Black, her brothers are Black, her uncles are Black, her male cousins are Black and for this reason, George Floyd being Black, she saw in his tragic fate something that could have happened to any male member of both her immediate family and extended family of relatives. Secondly, she said, tearfully and inconsolably, that since the day of the incident, she has been haunted by the fact that she could not save George Floyd, that the video that she shot was ineffectual in saving his life. “I have been apologizing and apologizing to him”, she concluded. This is a young girl who is not out of her teens but had the inspired nerve and the presence of mind to keep her phone camera’s lens totally focused on Chauvin, thereby capturing that matchless act of 21st century lynching of Floyd by Chauvin. The world has most appropriately conferred great heroism on this young woman but what does she herself feel? She is haunted by the feeling that she failed George Floyd. What is this if not humanity at its most ineffable?
Within hours of the testimony of Dr. Martin Tobin, experts in the fields of pulmonology and forensic criminology had proclaimed that nobody in living memory can remember a more thorough, painstaking and commanding testimony in an American criminal trial than the one given yesterday by this expert. Without beclouding his testimony with jargon and alienated expertise, Dr. Tobin simultaneously made what he had to say both remarkably simple and understandable and yet impressively knowledgeable. At the same time that he drew expansively on scientific concepts and analysis, he used metaphors and similes drawn from quotidian, everyday experiences. As if teaching a class in basic physiology and pulmonology, he took the members of the jury through elements of the body’s response to imposed deprivation of oxygen. As a result, he delivered what was surely the most devastating blow to Chauvin and his lawyers, this being the argument by Chauvin’s lawyers that Floyd’s death was caused by his preexisting diseases and substance abuse. In Dr. Tobin submission, this claim is completely lacking in merit because even a very healthy person could not have survived the length of time in which Floyd’s body was starved of oxygen.
With only speculative or, at best, deductive reasoning as my guide, I declare that Dr. Tobin’s testimony was deeply inspired by Darnella Frazier’s video. Since he referred a lot to the video, it is obvious that that documentary evidence served the pulmonologist well in his own labours. But I am suggesting that there is more than a mere adventitious connection here. I have no other way of expressing this thought than by asserting, very simply, that humanity at its most elemental in one person, one instance, calls to and inspires humanity in another person, another instance. In other words, we can imagine that Dr. Tobin must have said to himself that if a teenage girl could be so faithful to what is most human in us at the moment of George Floyd’s savage slaying, he, Dr. Tobin, had a moral and spiritual obligation to extend and expand the reach and scope of that humaneness. Let me put some concrete flesh to this abstract, speculative claim: in Dr. Tobin’s detailed, scientific recreation of George Floyd’s last minutes of life, it was as if we are at last enabled to concretely place ourselves in the living tissue of the slain man’s own experience as life was being snuffed out of him.
There is a thin, almost invisible thread of argument pertaining to the claim that I am making here of a moral and spiritual victory even before the end of the trial. It is time for me to make this thread clear at this juncture. What does the thread consist of? It consists, first, of the fact that if Darnella Frazier had not produced that video of the slaying of George Floyd, Chauvin and his accomplices would never have been charged; they would never even have been dismissed from the MPD, the Minneapolis Police Department. Secondly, without thar video, the MPD and virtually all other Police Departments in the country would have closed ranks to impose the notorious, so-called ‘blue wall of silence” through which policemen and women never give evidence against their colleagues, especially when the case involves the slaying of an unarmed Black man or woman. Thirdly, it is on record that it is very rare for a jury to return a verdict of guilt for any White police officer standing trial for the killing of a Black person. Finally, in the trial of Chauvin, all that is required for the accused to be set free is for one single juror out of twelve jurors to return a verdict of not guilty. Taken together, all these factors mean that until an actual verdict of guilty is imposed on Chauvin, it is premature to declare victory in the trial of Chauvin, even if it is a moral victory.
Well, not completely. This is because apart from the overwhelming evidence of Darnella Frazier’s video and Dr. Tobin’s expert pulmonologist’s testimony, there is another piece of testimony that has broken from the normative pattern of protection of White police officers from prosecution or guilty verdicts in the slaying of unarmed Black people. What is this testimony? Well, for the first time, other police officers have given damning evidence against another police officer, this being Derek Chauvin. It so happens that the police officers involved in this instance are officers greatly superior in rank and authority to Chauvin in the MPD. In their testimonies, these officers asserted that Chauvin used excessive, deadly force on Floyd; and they testified that Chauvin was not acting in line with both his training and the ethics of the MPD. Indeed, other uniformed personnel of the Municipality of Minneapolis like an operator in the emergency hotline phone service and a staff of first-aid medical personnel both testified that Chauvin and his accomplices prevented them from rendering aid to Floyd when it was still possible to save his life.
What is, or will be the distance from moral to actual victory in the Chauvin trial? This is the heart of the matter in this discussion. In any country in the world in which the humanity of all citizens is taken for granted and in which the equality of all before the law, especially in matters of life and death, is both a cherished legal precept and a routinely confirmed ruling in trial cases, this question would never have arisen because there isn’t or shouldn’t be any gap between moral and actual victory. Chauvin having been shown to be so massively in guilt, it should not turn out at the end of the trial that he is acquitted. If that should happen, then something fundamentally flawed is wrong with American justice. This is why nearly all commentators, all pundits agree that it is not only Chauvin that is on trial but America itself, with humanity as the plaintiff.
This contention is not as abstract or fanciful as it may seem. In concrete terms, virtually everyone is fearful, very fearful that in spite of the overwhelming evidence against Chauvin, he may be acquitted. After all, it will take only ONE juror out of twelve to acquit him. In Trump’s America, it is highly probable that such a juror could have sneaked through the roadblock of legal impartiality with one purpose and one purpose only: to free Chauvin in order to repair the cracks in the edifice of racism and White supremacy in the police forces of America caused by the worldwide reaction to the slaying of Floyd. Permit me to carefully and clearly delineate what I have in mind here.
Earlier in this discussion, I made mention of a so-called “blue wall of silence”, explaining that this pertains to the fact that it is a given, manifestly evidentiary fact of policing in America that the police never testify against their own, especially where it pertains to police brutality and/or murderous violence against Black men and women. This is why in the present trial of Derek Chauvin for the slaying of George Floyd, the testimonies of Chauvin’s superiors against him were so unprecedented that commentators and pundits are still in shock, still in amazement that it happened. Similarly, the testimony of Dr. Tobin yesterday seemed so remarkably beyond the pale of what obtains in American trials of police officers that the foreign sounding accent of the pulmonologist has been remarked, this foreign accent being nothing more (or less) than that of a first-generation, Irish-American who was born in Ireland. In this context, one can imagine that the “foreignness” of Dr. Tobin is appealing and disturbing to Americans for the same reason: it affirms their common humanity with George Floyd while it also confounds them with the fact that they had to discover this through a “foreigner”.
“I am human, therefore nothing human is strange to me”, so famously said Terrence, a major playwright of Roman antiquity, who was a freed North African slave also known as Plubius Terentius Afer. By this Terrence meant both the good and the bad, the benevolent and the maleficent in humanity. The video of George Floyd’s slaying sent unprecedented shock waves throughout the world because Chauvin, the White policeman, was so elemental in his incarnation of human inhumanity. Let me rephrase this observation: it was inhumanity at its worst; nevertheless, it was a very human inhumanity. It was specifically an inhumanity of the genus Americanus, historically most perpetrated against Black people and other Non-White peoples. For this reason, everyone knows that it is not only Chauvin but America itself that is on trial in this case. Either Chauvin will be convicted or he will be acquitted. Don’t put his acquittal beyond probability; and neither should you take it for granted that his acquittal is a foregone conclusion, as many Black people all over the world assume. But it is on the possibility of his conviction that I wish to conclude this discussion.
If Chauvin is convicted, will that lead to a symbolic and actual conviction of the racist and White supremacist culture and practices of policing in America? That is the question, compatriots. We are talking here of nothing short of a revolution. The Biden administration and the Democratic Party seem both very much aware that this will be the necessary and logical consequence of the conviction of Chauvin. But beyond that awareness, beyond legislation and policy, what actual struggles around implementation of legislation and policies will be like is another matter entirely.
Biodun Jeyifo
