Derek Chauvin trial will explore officer’s record of using force on people before encountering George Floyd

Opening statements begin on Monday in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the white former Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering George Floyd, an unarmed Black man.

The trial will not only focus on Mr Floyd’s final moments, where Mr Chauvin knelt on his neck for minutes on end as he pleaded for air, but will explore limited evidence of past incidents where force was used on other people Mr Chauvin was arresting, according to a ruling from a Minneapolis court last week.

Hennepin County District Court judge Peter A Cahill ruled that prosecutors will be able to mention two past incidents as they make their case – one where a suspect got life-saving medical attention from Mr Chauvin and others, and another arrest where Mr Chauvin pinned a woman to the ground and kneeled on her back – so long as they can show why the stories are relevant to understanding Mr Chauvin’s training and experience as an officer.

In one incident from August 2015, Mr Chauvin arrived with other officers to a call about a potentially emotionally disturbed person screaming at an apartment building. They found him shirtless, “clenching his fists and standing in a fighting stance towards the bathroom mirror as he continued in an unknown biblical style chant”.

An officer eventually Tased the man and he was put in handcuffs after a struggle, where officers, including Mr Chauvin, called for an ambulance, moved the disturbed man into so-called “rescue position” on his side, monitoring his vital signs. A sergeant later recommended Mr Chauvin and others for a Lifesaving Award, after learning from the hospital that man’s “elevated cardiac condition could have been fatal” if officers hadn’t given medical aid.

In contrast, during the arrest at the centre of this month’s trial, after officers struggled to get Mr Floyd into a squad car while responding to a call he used a counterfeit $20 bill, Mr Chauvin pinned Mr Floyd to the ground for roughly nine minutes as he said he couldn’t breathe, before an ambulance eventually arrived. (Last year, two autopsies, one from the county and one from Mr Floyd’s family, deemed the cause of his death a homicide, though they disagreed on the exact cause).

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State prosecutors have argued including this sort of evidence is necessary because, “in the upcoming trial, the State anticipates that Defendant or defence counsel may claim that Defendant did not intentionally assault Mr Floyd in a manner inconsistent with training,” they argued in a filing last year.

Another incident that will be scrutinised during the trial bears even more similarity to Mr Chauvin’s arrest of Mr Floyd. In 2017, according to the state, Mr Chauvin responded to a domestic assault call. When he moved in to handcuff the suspect, she resisted, so he “pulled her down to floor face first and kneeled on her to pin her body so we could finish handcuffing her,” Mr Chauvin wrote in a report of the incident.

The woman reportedly refused to stand, so officers had to carry her out of the building, face-down, by her arms and legs, according to body camera video. From there, they wrote, they put her “safely” face-down on the grass, while the state argues body camera video suggests her face was mostly on the cement sidewalk.

Mr Chauvin wrote in his report that he “kept body weight” on the woman to “pin” her until a squad car could arrive, and the state argues he knelt on her back and had another officer hog-tie the woman even though she stopped resisting.

“The state attempts to characterise Mr. Chauvin’s use of force as ‘unreasonable’ or ‘beyond what was needed,’ ” Mr Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric Nelson wrote at the time the potential evidence was introduced. “And in every single one, it was determined by a supervisor that Mr. Chauvin’s use of force was reasonable in the circumstances and authorised by law and MPD [Minneapolis Police Department] policy.”

The trial will also look into elements of Mr Floyd’s past interactions with police, where arrests yielded evidence that Mr Floyd took drugs and had serious pre-existing medical conditions including heart problems and high blood pressure, which the county noted as “significant conditions” in its autopsy last year.

“Clearly there is a cause of death issue here, and it is highly contested,” Judge Cahill said last week, allowing review of the medical information revealed in a 2019 incident.

After Mr Floyd died last May, Mr Chauvin’s name spread widely, and other Minneapolis residents came forward and said they’d been mistreated by the officer.

Three weeks before they arrived on the scene to arrest George Floyd, some of the same officers, including Mr Chauvin, were accused of roughly detaining another Black man, who had been mistaken for a suspect in a hostage call.

Others arrested by Mr Chauvin, many of them people of colour, said he used excessive force, though Mr Chauvin was never formally reprimanded for his use of force.