George floyd

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to over 22 years in prison by Judge Peter Cahill on Friday for the murder of George Floyd. Prosecutors had asked the imposing punishment be closer to 30 years. State guidelines recommend a 12-and-a-half-year sentence for a first-time offender. Cahill went beyond the guidelines, citing Chauvin’s ‘abuse of a position of trust and authority and also the particular cruelty’ to Floyd. A 22-year sentence tends to be associated with more grizzly offenders. Last year, 17-year-old Jered Ohsman was sentenced as an adult by a Hennepin County District Court — the same court that sentenced Chauvin — for killing 39-year-old Steven Markey during a botched robbery.

The trial of Derek Chauvin continues to generate headlines — weeks after the former Minneapolis police officer’s April 20 conviction of the murder of George Floyd. This week the story is about juror number 52, who appears to have added considerable weight to Chauvin’s argument that his trial was not fair. Among Chauvin’s current motions is one asking the trial judge Peter Cahill to recall the entire jury for interrogation over possible juror misconduct. He may have a case. Brandon Mitchell — juror number 52 — stepped forward to identify himself and make the media rounds. He is a 31-year-old black Minneapolis high school basketball coach.

NBC's flagship news program completely garbled one of the week’s top stories: a deadly fight among teenage girls in Columbus, Ohio, which ended with a policeman shooting and killing a knife-wielding attacker, 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant. The network’s coverage was an abomination. NBC omitted vital information and distorted what actually happened. The Biden White House immediately piled on, insisting that the Columbus shooting was the product of racism. They did so at an incredibly sensitive moment — minutes after a Minneapolis jury convicted policeman Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd. Since NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt and other media programs did not report the Columbus story fairly or accurately, let’s do so here.

‘Let them kill each other’ is now the message coming from the White House, the activist left and mainstream media pundits in the wake of the police shooting death of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant. After several hours of speculation, Bryant was shown on police body camera footage attacking multiple people with a long kitchen knife outside a residence. Bryant was shot when she charged a girl up against a vehicle with the knife. The officer fired four times, mortally wounding Bryant, who was pronounced dead at the hospital. Twitter activists, cable news hosts and even the White House should have admitted their error in jumping to the conclusion that this incident was somehow linked to Derek Chauvin being found guilty of the murder of George Floyd.

The jury rendered guilty verdicts on all three charges against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter — after 10 hours of deliberations. He will be sentenced on the second-degree murder charge that was the most serious of the three. The charges were brought in an atmosphere of mob justice on May 29 and June 3, 2020, within days of the death of George Floyd on May 25. Indeed, the charges were filed in response to the demands of the mob while the Twin Cities were burning down at its hands.

So far in the 2020s, American citizens have been hectored endlessly about wearing masks, staying safe indoors and standing apart out. Yet the people who smash up neighborhoods are encouraged to keep expressing their pain. The concept of law and order is therefore becoming a twisted joke. Yes, Minneapolis is rioting again — another police violence video circulated on the internet, another round of anarchy, another bonfire of American values. This time it’s Daunte Wright, a young man shot dead as he tried to escape the police in Brooklyn Center, a northern suburb of the Twin Cities. The officer responsible, a woman called Kim Potter, seems to have believed she was using a Taser to stop Wright. But she got him with a gun instead.

As I write, jury selection for the murder trial of Derek Chauvin is about to begin in Minneapolis. You remember Derek Chauvin, right? He is the (former) policeman charged with the murder of St George Floyd, race martyr (also drug addict, woman abuser, and career criminal). Chauvin and his three colleagues disgusted civilized opinion last spring when a bystander’s video clip of Officer Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck was released. Nine minutes. Chauvin kept Floyd pinned to the ground for some nine minutes. ‘I can’t breathe,’ Floyd can be heard crying. An ambulance eventually came to whisk Floyd off to hospital. Too late. Floyd died, murdered by the brutish policeman who cruelly, gratuitously, asphyxiated him by kneeling on his neck, cutting off his air supply.

After months of trying to spin the nationwide unrest as 'mostly peaceful' or ignoring it entirely, Democrats have discovered some fresh messaging: the riots are violent and they're Trump's fault. Joe Biden seized on this new storyline during a campaign speech in Pittsburgh on Monday, telling voters that Trump is 'stoking violence in our cities.' 'This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence — because for years he has fomented it,' Biden asserted. This is one of the most dastardly and dishonest schemes the Democrats have ever cooked up.

Kamala Harris’s selection as the Democratic vice presidential nominee has been touted as the remarkable success story of a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. It is that. But it also represents the dramatic ascendency of a subset of the Democratic party that used to be dismissed as the ‘loony left’ of politics: the ‘San Francisco Democrats.’ The phrase ‘San Francisco Democrat’ was coined by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, who brandished it as a weapon at the 1984 GOP convention in Dallas. San Francisco was where the Democrats nominated Walter Mondale to challenge Reagan.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar may have to eat her words after declaring last year that Donald Trump will 'never win Minnesota'. A new Emerson College poll released Tuesday shows the President trailing Joe Biden by just three percentage points. The poll has Trump within the margin of error, meaning the state is effectively a toss-up at this point. The President is reportedly planning to visit the state on Monday in an attempt to provide counter-programming for the Democratic National Convention, which was meant to take place across the state line in Wisconsin, and to capitalize on his recent gains in the polls. The prospect of winning Minnesota is certainly giddying for Trump, who frequently laments that he just barely lost the state in 2016. Hillary Clinton carried the state by a mere 1.

No one would argue that Rep. John Lewis doesn't deserve a proper memorial. He was a civil rights icon and a long-serving member of Congress who was beloved by his colleagues. In the middle of a pandemic, however, how do we decide who gets the pomp and circumstance of a traditional burial and who has to watch their loved one go six feet under via Zoom call? Funerals are important: they acknowledge the sanctity of life and allow friends and family to come together to grieve their loss. This reality doesn't change based on how famous or revered an individual was to the general public: it doesn't hurt any less to say goodbye to someone who was just a dad or just someone's child or just a dear friend. Their lives aren't any less significant.

The great conundrum facing the anti-American left at the moment is how to react to the violent protest ripping up various Democratic-run cities. What is the preferred narrative? The two main choices are 1) it’s all peaceful protest, the 'right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances’? or 2) let ’er rip: we’re out there destroying stuff and hurting people because the country’s falling apart and the sooner the better.

Does anyone actually remember George Floyd? What started out as a noble cause to curb police brutality in urban and African American communities has morphed into a corporate crusade of ne'er do wells tossing out woke distractions to keep the Instagram millennial mafia off their backs, as well as the looting for likes and posing for photos on the hoods of police cars, all in the hopes of a viral snap for Instagram, TikTok or Twitter. We’ve seen hordes of entitled white women from Georgetown in Lululemon Yoga gear shrieking at black police officers about their privilege and r/Chapo antifa larpers tearing down statues of Ulysses S. Grant or berating older black people about their history. And let’s not forget that goddamn racist elk statue in Portland.