Let’s get right into it, shall we?

Attorney Gregory Joseph has filed a Petition for Postconviction Relief seeking to vacate the 2021 second-degree murder conviction of former Minneapolis Department Officer Derek Chauvin related to the death of pseudo-saint George Floyd. (News of which you certainly missed because, despite its sensational assertions, it was largely swept under the rug by legacy media.)

Why now? As counsel expresses in a 71-page memorandum accompanying the petition, in the vain hope (to somewhat give away the conclusion here) that “removed from the hysteria of the day,” a court “can finally look at the facts and evidence through a clear lens … without the pressure of the public mood.”

No one contests that Officer Chauvin restrained the struggling suspect by kneeling either on his back or neck, “depending on the perspective of the video,” per the petition.

Rather, the attorney maintains, the “case resolved to two issues: (1) intent – was the restraint of George Floyd consistent with MPD policy and practice, and (2) causation – did the way the officers restrain(ed) George Floyd cause his death?”

Joseph presents a compelling – one could almost argue slam-dunk – case that the answers to those questions are “(1) yes” and “(2) no.”

As to intent:

The petition alleges that the Minneapolis Police Department’s (MPD) then-chief of police, commander of training, and the officer who “oversaw defensive tactics training” all falsely testified that the restraint violated department policy, as demonstrated by:

• A slide from a PowerPoint used in police training depicting exactly that technique – kept out of evidence because the defense could not prove that Chauvin had seen it.
• The fact that “34 current and former MPD officers have come forward to provide sworn statements that MPD trained them to use a knee-to-neck restraint in a variety of situations” – including the tactic employed by Chauvin and fellow officers.
• A photograph that surfaced of the commander of training (Katie Blackwell) personally using the restraint technique in the course of a defamation suit she brought against a journalist and a conservative website, accusing the three MPD supervisors of false testimony. That suit was dismissed because, according to Joseph, the judge found those charges to be “substantially true.” Blackwell signed a statement that the judge’s findings were “accurate, true, and correct,” and, it is separately reported, was required to pay the defamation defendants’ legal fees.

As to causation:

• Joseph maintains that the only medical witness who based his testimony solely on the physical evidence was the chief county medical examiner, Andrew Baker. According to the petition, Baker “found no medical evidence (in his autopsy) on May 26th supporting the conclusion that Floyd died of asphyxiation” caused by the knee pressure. While the death occurred during a stress-inducing arrest and restraint, he primarily identified Floyd’s severe heart disease – including several occluded arteries – and the presence of fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system as contributing factors.
• Baker had, it seems, called an assistant county attorney shortly after the autopsy and asked her, “What happens when the actual evidence doesn’t match up with the narrative that everyone’s already decided on?” A conversation not disclosed to the defense.
• The prosecution’s expert witnesses, in contrast, appear to have speculated that Floyd died of restraint-caused asphyxiation based on their review of the famous video – conclusions Joseph insists they were not qualified to draw from video evidence.
• One witness, a pulmonologist, employed the video and photos to make ostensibly exacting calculations as to the effect of the kneeling on Floyd’s airways and ability to breathe. Joseph shows that his arm’s-length conclusion that the suspect’s brain was deprived of oxygen was diametrically at odds with Baker’s findings upon directly examining the body.

The conventional conservative pundit play at this point: join calls for the verdict to be vacated and for Chauvin to receive a fair trial with excluded evidence presented to the jury, false statements corrected, and improper expert testimony disallowed.

But this commentator will instead posit a brutal near-certainty: regardless of the passage of time and the seeming mountain of evidence of Chauvin’s innocence – and even of prosecutorial misconduct – no court will act to vacate his conviction and grant a new trial, or even grant the fallback request of fresh evidentiary hearings.

Because no judge wants to take on the extraordinary burden of potentially lighting the fuse that ignites a new season of coast-to-coast riots in the name of “attack(ing) some of the core beliefs and structures of cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist society.”

In essence, Chauvin – sacrificed on the altar of economic and racial “justice” to appease BLM-inflamed mobs – will remain the victim not of a heckler’s but a hooligans’ veto.

But even rampaging and plundering may not be necessary. Simply dropping the race card, and thereby creating the prospect of being smeared as bigots in the media, was reportedly sufficient to intimidate Department of Education officials in the selfsame Land of 10,000 Lakes to greenlight continued payments to Somali groups despite the discovery of hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud.

Any jurist considering providing real justice to the wrongly convicted law enforcement officer will be certain to be the target of bitter invective spewed by professional grifters, accompanied by systematic character assassination via cynical politicians, bought-and-paid-for social media influencers, and lapdog journalists.

For a conscientious and courageous judge, as Baker lamented to the assistant county attorney in discussing his narrative-bending autopsy findings, “This is the kind of case that ends careers.”

For Derek Chauvin, it’s a case that tragically has not only ended a career distinguished by multiple commendations, but any prospect of freedom in the near future.

Weep for him – and for the nation and the end of a system of “justice” that is proving increasingly incapable of summoning the courage, conviction, or sense of honor to merit that designation.

Bob Maistros, a regular contributor to Issues & Insights, is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.