Railroaded Derek Chauvin’s foes are out for his blood in prison and his case

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020. AP

I guess it’s no surprise that Derek Chauvin has been stabbed almost to death in prison.

The Minneapolis cop convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020 has been thoroughly scrubbed of his personhood, let alone his rights.

Nobody bothered to tell his family or his lawyer that another inmate had attacked him Saturday.

Despite being the most notorious ex-cop in America, he wasn’t protected from violent prisoners.

The fact he was even in the ill-run federal prison in Tucson, Ariz., 1,638 miles from his family, speaks volumes.

He could hardly be further from home.

Chauvin is more reviled than all the pedophile rapists and sadistic serial killers in the land because someone was needed to embody the myth of systemic police racism that fueled the Democrats’ 2020 campaign and created a frightening atmosphere of chaos and lawlessness that helped dislodge Donald Trump from the White House.

No help from Supremes

In the wake of Floyd’s death, anarchists were given the green light to riot, burn, loot and kill in an orgy of anti-cop violence that threatened to engulf the country.

The corrupt political manipulators who engineered the unrest, and the cowardly agents of the state who staged the courtroom railroading of Chauvin would like nothing better than for him to be dead, to save them from exposure.

That exposure surely is coming, as an injustice so clear cannot stand in a country that still believes in the rule of law.

Liz Collin’s stunning documentary “The Fall of Minneapolis” is only the start.

The Supreme Court last week refused Chauvin long-shot request to review his 2021 murder conviction.

His lawyers argued that he had been denied a fair trial because Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill refused to move to a venue outside Minneapolis despite massive pretrial publicity and the prejudicial impact of angry mobs outside the courthouse, causing jurors to express fear for their own safety.

If a courthouse surrounded by barbed wire and National Guardsmen didn’t send a clear enough message of the ramifications of a not-guilty verdict, there was Rep. Maxine Waters, who flew into town to rabble-rouse.

The Democratic congresswoman urged protesters — who were attacking police and defying a curfew — to “get more confrontational” if Chauvin was acquitted. “Stay on the street [because] we’re looking for a guilty verdict.”

As if the sacked city, demoralized police force and soaring crime was not trouble enough.

Joe Biden was no better. While the jury was deliberating, the president said he was “praying” for a conviction.

He said the summer of riots had “unified people of every race and generation in peace” and claimed Floyd’s death had “ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism . . . that is a stain on our nation’s soul,” when no evidence ever was presented at Chauvin’s trial that race was a factor.

A defense witness even had a severed pig’s head deposited outside his former home.

How could the jurors and defense team and witnesses not be intimidated?

The refusal of the Supreme Court to take on the case did not surprise legal analysts, because the court accepts fewer than 2% of the appeals it is presented each year, and generally is loath to second-guess judicial discretion.

But Judge Cahill decided not to allow the trial to be moved out of Minneapolis, not to sequester the jury and not to allow the defense to present evidence that the “maximal restraint technique” hold that Chauvin used to subdue a violent Floyd was part of the training of all cops in the Minneapolis police department.

Cahill ordered that a photograph (slide) in police training materials — which showed a man being restrained with a knee in precisely the way Chauvin restrained Floyd — be redacted.

The Minnesota Court of Appeals, in rejecting Chauvin’s appeal earlier this year, claimed he “could not show that he received the training shown on this slide [and] cannot demonstrate that the exclusion of the slide prejudiced him.”

The media characterized the “maximal restraint technique” as Chauvin’s “signature move,” as if he freelanced it.

It looked harsh in the viral video of Chauvin’s arrest, but it was textbook police academy training, applied by all Minneapolis police to control handcuffed, uncooperative, violent, or drug-affected suspects.

If the training was flawed, surely that is the fault of the department. Even if the chief of police testified under oath that “it was not” a trained Minneapolis police defensive tactics technique, the evidence was against him.

There even was a diagram showing how to apply the hold in Chauvin’s own training manuals which his mother showed Collin in her film.

How could denying the jury the full facts not prejudice Chauvin?

‘Preserving trust’?

So much of what occurred in the Chauvin trial seems inexplicable now, in light of new evidence uncovered in Collin’s film, which I wrote about last week.

A clue to Cahill’s application of “judicial discretion” can be found in a boastful speech that he gave in Nevada to a conference of judges, the year after the trial, in October 2022, titled “Stoicism and the Art of Judging, or Lessons Learned From a High-Profile Criminal Trial.”

Presumably Cahill thinks of himself as the virtuous Stoic, but his advice was modish, incoherent, and plain wrong.

“Every case that you deal with should be about racial justice,” he told the assembled judges.

In the Chauvin trial, he admitted, “race was not part of the evidence. It was a murder trial. It was about cause of death, who did it, what the intent and knowledge and motive of Mr. Chauvin was, but it doesn’t mean we ignore racial justice. . . . Think about the most dismal failures of judiciary, cases that have resulted in the degradation of the trust and confidence in the public in the third branch of government.”

He cited slavery and segregation cases such as Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson, none of which had anything to do with Chauvin, unless he is implying that it’s time for reparatory injustice against white cops.

“All these high profile cases where the judiciary failed in the area of racial justice,” Cahill said, adding, “It is, in my mind, the number one issue for us as judges for preserving trust and confidence in the system, is to make equal justice under law reality every day.”

There was not a shred of self-awareness in Cahill’s comments.

If any case has the potential to destroy public “trust and confidence” in the justice system it is the State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin in his courtroom.

The gall of that Biden

Joe Biden made an ill-judged boast last week: “I cannot prove what I’m about to say,” he said, “but I believe one of the reasons why Hamas struck when they did was they knew that I was working very closely with the Saudis and others . . . to bring peace to the region.”

The narcissism is breathtaking, as is the admission of incompetence and the sly diversion.

The Abraham Accords were Donald Trump’s triumph, and his team would not have mucked it up, as Biden did by, among other things, insulting the Saudis the minute he got into office.

Biden’s antipathy to Trump and petty insistence he receive no credit — even to the point of erasing “Abraham” — set back the project, and the insane resurrection of the Iran deal helped fuel Hamas.