Amy Fleetty
Associated Press
From left: J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A jury has chosen to begin the trial Monday, Oct. 24, of two former Minneapolis police officers charged in the death of George Floyd. J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thou were both charged with aiding and abetting second-degree unintentional murder and aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter.
Floyd, who was black, died on May 25, 2020, after another white former police officer, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for about nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and pleaded with him that he could not breathe. Kueng knelt on Floyd’s back during the arrest while you stopped bystanders. Another officer, Thomas Lane, has pleaded guilty to one state charge and is not facing trial.
Key figures in the trial include:
Judge
Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill handled Chauvin’s trial and returned to the bench for the trial.
Cahill began working in the county’s public defender’s office in 1984 and served as a prosecutor for 10 years, serving as senior adviser to U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar while serving as the county attorney general.
Cahill has been a judge since 2007 and is known for being decisive and direct. He has allowed Chauvin’s trial to be live-streamed because of huge public interest and COVID-19 restrictions, and said at a recent national justice conference that he believes that if he doesn’t, the results “will never be accepted by the community.”
But Minnesota courts typically don’t allow cameras, and with COVID-19 restrictions eased, he won’t allow it this time around.
sue
Attorney General Keith Ellison led Chauvin’s prosecution at the request of Gov. Tim Walz after civil rights advocates in the community said Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman was not trusted by the black community.
Ellison, the state’s first African-American elected attorney general, has previously served in Congress and served as a defense attorney. During Chauvin’s trial, he sometimes appeared in court but was not part of the trial team.
Matthew Frank and Steven Schleicher, who both helped convict Chauvin, will return to lead the team. Frank, a seasoned attorney, also won a guilty plea in the case of Lois Riess, a Minnesota woman notorious for killing her husband in 2018 and then in Florida of a woman and posing as her before her arrest.
Schleicher, a former federal prosecutor who led the prosecution of the man who pleaded guilty to the 1989 kidnapping and killing of Jacob Wetterling, whose initial disappearance helped inspire a 1994 federal law requiring states to create sex offender registries.
defense
Kueng is Black, the youngest of the four officers on the scene, and a rookie just a few days into the job. His personnel file shows he speaks, reads and writes Russian, but does not list any disciplinary action. At his federal trial, he testified that he complied with Chauvin because Chauvin was his senior officer, and that’s what he was trained to do.
His attorney, Tom Plunkett, is representing another former Minneapolis police officer in a high-profile case. Mohamed Noor was convicted in the 2017 fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, who called 911 to report a possible sexual assault.
Thao, a Hmong American who was Chauvin’s partner on the day Floyd was killed, is an eight-year veteran. City records show six complaints against Shao, who was the subject of a 2017 federal lawsuit accusing him and another official of using excessive force.
During the federal trial, Thao testified that on the day of Floyd’s arrest, he acted as a “traffic cone” to keep traffic away from other officers. He said his role was crowd control and he thought Floyd was breathing.
His attorney, Bob Paule, was a public defender before starting his own practice. He obtained a rare acquittal for a murder defendant through a mental illness defense, his website says. He also said he was part of a team that dismissed 23 murder charges in a separate case after questioning prosecutors for misconduct in a grand jury lawsuit.
George Floyd
Floyd, 46, moved from Houston to Minneapolis a few years before his death in hopes of finding a job, but lost his job as a restaurant bouncer due to COVID-19. On May 25, 2020, an employee at a Minneapolis grocery store called the police that Floyd tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.
His girlfriend, Courteney Ross, testified tearfully at Chauvin’s trial that she met Floyd in a Salvation Army shelter in 2017 and that she and Floyd were both dealing with an opioid addiction fight. She said he overdose in March 2020, but it has been several weeks since then. She said she suspected he started using it again about two weeks before his death because of changes in his behaviour. She said both she and Floyd had “several efforts to kick the addiction.”
One of Floyd’s brothers, Philonise Floyd, testified at Chauvin’s trial that George Floyd was the leader of the family who grew up impoverished in Houston’s Third Ward.
“He made the best banana mayo sandwiches ever,” recalled Philonis Floyd. “George couldn’t cook. He couldn’t boil water.”
jury
A jury of 16 Hennepin County residents will be selected to hear the evidence, with a final 12-person deliberation. Their names will be kept secret until further court orders. Hundreds of jurors were subpoenaed and sent a 17-page questionnaire to assess their experiences and thoughts on issues such as civil rights, policing and their overall trust in officials.
