A forensic pathologist called to testify by the defense said it was his medical opinion that George Floyd died from cardiac arrhythmia.
The lawyer for the former officer Derek Chauvin began calling witnesses to the stand this week, including an associate of George Floyd’s who was in the car with him when the police arrived, and a Minneapolis Park Police officer on the scene. The defense is trying to build a case that Mr. Floyd was affected by drugs he had taken, and that the bystanders were a threat to the officers who pinned Mr. Floyd to the ground.
Here are some key moments from recent testimony.
David Fowler, former chief medical examiner of Maryland, said he believed George Floyd died from cardiac arrhythmia.
Derek Chauvin’s defense called on Dr. David Fowler, who retired as Maryland’s chief medical examiner in 2019 and has a history of involvement with high-profile police use-of-force cases, to testify on Wednesday as an expert witness.
At the request of Eric J. Nelson, a lawyer for Mr. Chauvin, Dr. Fowler said he reviewed medical, police and ambulance records, as well as toxicology reports and video footage, among other information in the George Floyd case.
Dr. Fowler explained that a death certificate includes a primary cause of death as well as other significant conditions contributing to a person’s death, per guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He said it was his medical opinion that Mr. Floyd suffered cardiac arrhythmia, which was contributed to by his underlying health conditions, including heart disease, drug use and exposure to carbon monoxide from the exhaust pipe during his restraint by the police.
“All of those combined to cause Mr. Floyd’s death,” he said.
While he was chief medical examiner of Maryland, Dr. Fowler ruled that the death of Anton Black, a Black teenager who was killed during an interaction with the police in 2018, was an accident, The Baltimore Sun reported. No one was charged.
In December, Mr. Black’s family filed a federal lawsuit against Dr. Fowler, the officers involved in the incident and others.
“Two years before George Floyd died after being restrained and pinned down by police, 19- year-old Anton Black (‘Anton’ or ‘Decedent’) was killed by three white law enforcement officials and a white civilian in a chillingly similar manner on Maryland’s Eastern Shore,” the lawsuit reads.
According to the lawsuit, officers restrained Mr. Black in a prone position for around six minutes after he had been Tasered and handcuffed as he “struggled to breathe, lost consciousness and suffered cardiac arrest.”
In 2015, Dr. Fowler’s office issued a homicide ruling in the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man from Baltimore who died of a spinal cord injury after a widely circulated cellphone video showed him being dragged screaming into a police transport van.
In that case, six officers were initially charged with crimes including manslaughter and murder; the first trial ended in a hung jury, and three more officers were acquitted after trials before a judge.
Dr. Fowler was also an adjunct associate professor of pathology and pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and has taught at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and other universities around Maryland. He serves as the National Association of Medical Examiners representative for the Forensic Science Standards Board. He also serves as a forensic pathology consultant for the Forensics Panel, a national organization that performs peer review for cases.
Morries Hall, who was with Mr. Floyd before his arrest, will not be compelled to take the stand.
Morries Lester Hall, who was in a car with George Floyd outside of Cup Foods in Minneapolis moments before the police pulled Mr. Floyd out of the car and later pinned him to the ground for more than nine minutes, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when he was called to testify on Wednesday.
Mr. Hall’s lawyer, Adrienne Cousins, said testifying about his actions, or even about being in the vehicle with Mr. Floyd on May 25, could potentially incriminate him.
“If he puts himself in that car, he exposes himself to possession charges,” Ms. Cousins said Wednesday, noting that drugs were found in the car in two searches.
Judge Peter A. Cahill granted Mr. Hall’s invocation of his Fifth Amendment rights, calling his reasoning valid.
Judge Cahill had ordered Derek Chauvin’s lawyer to draft a narrow list of questions that Mr. Hall might be able to answer without incriminating himself. Like Tuesday’s questioning of Shawanda Hill, who was also in the car with Mr. Floyd when he was arrested, the defense had hoped to ask about Mr. Floyd’s demeanor and behavior right before the arrest to bolster its argument that a drug overdose caused his death.
But Ms. Cousins said even answering those questions had the potential to incriminate him, and Judge Cahill agreed.
In her testimony, Mr. Floyd’s former girlfriend, Courteney Ross, said she and Mr. Floyd had purchased drugs from Mr. Hall in the past.
Mr. Hall has appeared in body camera footage throughout the trial, and on Tuesday, newly released footage showed him standing alongside Ms. Hill after Mr. Floyd had been taken away by officers.
According to a Minnesota official, Mr. Hall provided a false name to officers at the scene of Mr. Floyd’s arrest. At the time, he had outstanding warrants for his arrest on felony possession of a firearm, felony domestic assault and felony drug possession.
Mr. Hall was a longtime friend of Mr. Floyd’s. Both Houston natives, they had connected in Minneapolis through a pastor and had been in touch every day since 2016, Mr. Hall said in an interview with The Times last year. Mr. Hall said that he considered Mr. Floyd a confidant and a mentor, like many in the community.
A use-of-force expert says Mr. Chauvin’s actions were justified.
Barry Brodd, a former police officer and use-of-force expert, testified for the defense that Mr. Chauvin’s use of force against Mr. Floyd was justified — countering two weeks of prosecution witnesses who argued the opposite.
“I felt that Derek Chauvin was justified, and was acting with objective reasonableness, following Minneapolis Police Department policy and current standards of law enforcement, in his interactions with Mr. Floyd,” he said.
Mr. Brodd, who has nearly 30 years of law enforcement experience and specializes in police and civilian defense cases, referred to Graham v. Connor, a 1989 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled that an officer’s use of force must be “objectively reasonable,” but that “police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments — in circumstances that are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving — about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”
Officers must respond to imminent threats, Mr. Brodd said, which require a police officer to have a “reasonable fear that somebody is going to strike you, stab you, shoot you.”
To judge use-of-force cases, Mr. Brodd said he considered whether an officer had justification to detain a person, how the person responded to the officer — with compliance or varying degrees of resistance — and whether the officer’s use of force correlated with the level of resistance.
Mr. Brodd said that Mr. Chauvin’s use of force was appropriate for the level of resistance from Mr. Floyd, and that the officers would have been justified in using even more force.
“Police officers don’t have to fight fair,” he said. “They’re allowed to overcome your resistance by going up a level.”
Mr. Brodd said that officers had used force when they pulled Mr. Floyd from the police car and onto the ground, but that he did not consider keeping Mr. Floyd in a prone position, with his wrists handcuffed behind his back, to be a use of force. When questioned later by the prosecution, he amended this claim, saying the position and the officers on top of Mr. Floyd could have caused him pain and therefore qualified as use of force.
New body camera footage shows Mr. Floyd handcuffed on the street.
In new body camera footage shown to jurors, Mr. Floyd is seen handcuffed and sitting on the street near a Chinese restaurant, giving his name and birth date to one of the first police officers who arrived at Cup Foods after a clerk called to report that Mr. Floyd had used a fake $20 bill to buy cigarettes.
The footage was from the body camera of Peter Chang, a Minneapolis Park Police officer who arrived to back up the two rookie officers who first responded to the scene, before Mr. Chauvin and his partner arrived. Officer Chang’s testimony was the first in the trial from an officer who responded to the incident before Mr. Floyd had died.
During Mr. Chang’s testimony before the body camera video was shown, Mr. Nelson asked about one of the key points of his defense: that the group of vocal bystanders who gathered around the officers as they struggled on the ground with Mr. Floyd became increasingly angry and represented a threat to the officers. “They were very aggressive,” Mr. Chang agreed.
Yet on cross-examination by Matthew Frank, a prosecutor, Mr. Chang seemed to undercut the defense’s point about the angry crowd. Mr. Chang said that while he remained across the street to watch Mr. Floyd’s friends, he assumed the officers struggling with Mr. Floyd had things under control and said they did not ask for help.
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