Saturday, April 10, 2021

The Lizard People Want A Chauvin Acquittal

As I've said, I'm interested in what Alan Dershowitz has to say about the Derek Chauvin trial ongoing in Minneapolis, but he hasn't had a great deal to say about it. So instead, I've been following the commentary of criminal defense attorneys on blogs and YouTube. What I'm beginning to realize is that Dershowitiz is a law professor and an appellate attorney, as well as a media figure, and he's coming at the case from a completely different perspective fron the criminal defense attorneys. In fact, as a media figure, Dershowitz is a bit off key and a bit out of touch.

The YouTube video above dates from this past Monday, April 5, and it's based on the trial as of last week. It's plain that his view as of then was that, although Chauvin is not guilty of outright murder, he's got to be guilty of something, maybe manslaughter. But he does see some possibility of either an acquittal or a hung jury. In the video below, although it dates from yesterday, it refers to the testimony of Dr Martin Tobin on April 8.

Here he's coming at the case as a law professor and an appellate attorney. But in a very backhanded way, he's saynig that the prosecution's srongest expert witness, Dr Tobin, who as another YouTube commentator says, not only wrote the book on lungs but actually invented them, was not effective -- if only from an appellate attorney's point of view. Dr Tobin said there was only one cause of George Floyd's death, the pressure of Chauvin's knee on Floyd's neck (or "neck area"). But Dershowitz says this contradicts what we see every day; thousands of people are restrained this way and almost none die.

This is, I think, a very roundabout way for Dershowitz to be expressing his doubts about the case. The criminal defense attorneys I've been following are more open. The problem for the prosecution is that their own expert witnesses wind up agreeing very calmly with the questions Eric Nelson, Chauvin's attorney, puts to them on cross examination. They wind up sounding like defense witnesses, not prosecution.

For instance, in yesterday's testimony, Dr. Andrew Baker, the county medical examiner who performed Floyd's autopsy, listed a number of contributing causes for the death on the autopsy report, including drugs in Floyd's system and a serious heart condition. This contradicted Tobin's testimony the day before. Baker and another prosecution expert yesterday also told Nelson that there is "no safe level" of methamphetamine in the blood.

All of this continues to raise questions of reasonable doubt as to the cause of Floyd's death, irrespective of Tobin's opinion -- and this is before the defense calls its own experts. My wife thinks Nelson is an extremely competent attorney. What I find remarkable is how effective he's been at getting most of the prosecution expert witnesses to like him, trust him, and expand volubly on medical opinions that undermine the prosecution's case.

The bottom line is becoming that the possibility of either an acquittal or a hung jury in the Chauvin trial is looking better than remote. The question is, what the people who run the planet, whom I characterize for convenience as the "lizard people", are doing to anticipate this. A story in the Washington Examiner gives a hint:

[T]his trial involves determining the cause and manner of Floyd's death. If the drugs combined with his severe heart condition killed him, the defense argues, Chauvin isn't guilty of murder.

MSNBC's in-house race hustler Al Sharpton further fanned the flames on Friday, declaring, "I mean, if we can’t get some justice here, I don’t know what it takes."

By "some justice," Sharpton means a murder conviction, because, well, duh, Chauvin is guilty! Give the reverend a piece of that justice! Give him some!

There's a clear consensus that if in fact there's any outcome to the trial than a conviction for Chauvin, there will be another round of George Floyd riots. Dershowtiz shakes his head in disbelief, referring to the Rodney King riots of almost 30 years ago as being in "a different world". But Prof Dershowitz, if there's such a sense that this could happen again, how is this a different world? Rodney King was a long time ago, but there were far worse riots over George Floyd just last year.

The people this benefits are the media and the established elites. The media get fear-porn and disaster clickbait just when Trump has faded and COVID will be cured. The elites get the "different world" of the Rodney King riots and the tired old political formulas resuscitated one more time.