Have you ever wondered how bad leftist hegemony in the United States would be? Would there be Soviet-style show trials, and gulags, for instance? Wonder no more. Read TJ Harker’s American Scapegoat and see how an outstanding law enforcement officer became a scapegoat, and a convicted felon, for the “crime” of attempting to arrest a lifelong criminal and drug addict. I’m talking about Derek Chauvin and George Floyd.
TJ Harker, a former federal prosecutor, has a book coming out on December 1, just in time for Christmas shopping, that exposes the prosecution and conviction of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin for second degree murder as a grotesque miscarriage of justice. Harker analyzes the interaction between Chauvin (and his colleagues) and the recidivist, life-long criminal and drug addict George Floyd on the fateful day in the crazy summer of 2020 in meticulous detail. He also carefully reviews the evidence offered at trial. His conclusion: there was no excessive force in the course of the arrest, the officers (including Chauvin) performed as they were instructed, and Floyd died of a drug overdose, not compression of his neck. Chauvin and his fellow officers were guilty of no crime. Instead, there was a politically-motivated rush to judgment.
The only reason that radical left-wing Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison prosecuted Chauvin was political self-aggrandizement, BLM hysteria, and the threat of even worse rioting in Minneapolis if a scapegoat was not sacrificed to appease the mob. Ellison was happy to oblige. The hapless Chauvin was chosen to be the scapegoat. The result was a national disgrace and a stain on our history.
Harker’s book is called American Scapegoat, and it should be read by every American who takes the rule of law seriously. Chauvin is serving a prison sentence for a crime he didn’t commit, and as a law enforcement officer is at risk of being killed behind bars (he has been attacked once already, but survived). This is the worst miscarriage of justice I have witnessed in my lifetime—worse even than the J6 witch hunt. It is uncomfortable to recall the degree of derangement that the nation experienced during the COVID-19 hysteria and racial paroxysm in 2020’s “Summer of Love.” One thing that is unforgettable, however, is the nonstop narrative—fueled by an incomplete and misleading cell phone video that went viral—seemingly showing that Chauvin had “murdered” Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes.
Snap judgments by woke mobs based on cell phone videos often produce absurd decisions, but the persecution of Chauvin and his fellow officers turned our criminal justice system into a Soviet-style gulag. Chauvin unaccountably became the symbol for America’s supposed “systemic racism.” Career criminal Floyd was canonized as a martyred saint, and Chauvin, a 19-year veteran of the police department, was demonized as a brutal, sinister monster. As dispassionately reported by Harker in American Scapegoat, the true facts—ignored by the mob–were quite different.
On that fateful Memorial Day, May 25, 2020, four Minneapolis police officers responded to a merchant’s call regarding a customer who purchased a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store in a high crime area using a counterfeit $20 bill. The customer, still parked in front of the store, was the six foot six, 225-pound George Floyd, high as a kite and—unbeknownst to the arresting officers—on the verge of repeating a fentanyl overdose that nearly killed him just two months earlier (a familiar pattern for drug addicts such as Floyd). Transforming a routine police encounter with a recidivist career criminal into a second degree murder case against the police officers attempting to arrest Floyd was a despicable hoax that required biased reporting and the herculean efforts of a large cast of characters, whom Harker unmasks and debunks. Villains abound.
Harker exhaustively catalogs a litany of overlooked details, airbrushed out of the media’s false narrative, including: the drug-addled Floyd’s lack of cooperation; his ingestion of additional drugs while resisting arrest; the police dispatcher’s inexplicable delay in responding to a request for emergency medical services due to Floyd’s symptoms of a drug overdose (problems breathing, foaming at the mouth, “excited delirium,” etc.), which explained Chauvin’s prolonged restraint of the powerful, combative Floyd; the presence of a hostile crowd that formed during the lengthy wait for EMS (which normally takes only two-to-three minutes); craven local elected officials who rushed to judgment (led by the feckless Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey); prejudicial demagoguery unleashed by the ambulance-chasing race-hustler Ben Crump and the headline-chasing state AG Keith Ellison, who pushed Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, the presumptive prosecutor, out of the case; abandonment of any pretense of honoring the presumption of innocence for the four officers (as evidenced by their peremptory termination from the police department less than 24 hours after Floyd’s death); the massive rioting and arson in Minneapolis, fueled by local officials’ inflammatory rhetoric, that inflicted half a billion dollars of damage before the trial started; denial of defendants’ motions for a change of venue, despite abundant evidence that a fair trial in still-smoldering Minneapolis would be impossible; novel application of the felony-murder doctrine (due to a peculiarity of Minnesota law) that allows an unintentional death in the course of an “assault” to be charged as second degree murder; the city’s settlement of a wrongful death claim by Floyd’s family for $27 million, during jury selection in Chauvin’s prosecution; an “army” of high-powered private attorneys assisting the prosecution, creating a mismatch since Chauvin was represented by a single lawyer, Eric Nelson (funded by the police union), during the six-week trial; and the conduct of the trial itself, in a heavily-fortified courtroom on the 18th floor of a courthouse surrounded by razor wire and concrete barriers, with “3,500 National Guard troops and two armored personnel carriers maintain[ing] a perimeter around the facility.”
The trial judge, Peter Cahill, was a weak figurehead who failed to control the farcical proceedings at trial, and permitted the prosecution to foment prejudicial racial grievances. The jurors who had to negotiate a siege-like gauntlet each day faced the unmistakable conclusion that delivering a verdict of “not guilty” would expose Minneapolis to the same type of carnage that Los Angeles suffered in 1992 when a state court jury acquitted L.A.P.D. officers tried for inflicting excessive force on Rodney King in another videotaped encounter that went viral. In this atmosphere of intimidation, menace, and threatened violence, a fair trial was virtually impossible. California Rep. Maxine Waters exhorted a crowd in Minneapolis during Chauvin’s trial with this incendiary rhetoric:
Waters…told the crowd she wanted to see a murder conviction against Derek Chauvin for Floyd’s death. When asked what should happen if Chauvin isn’t convicted on murder charges, she replied, “We gotta stay on the street, we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational, we’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.” (Emphasis added.)
This, after extensive rioting, looting, and arson in Minneapolis in the wake of Floyd’s death, including the torching of the Third Precinct building where Chauvin and his fellow officers were based. Harker concludes: “The threat was clear: Deliver a guilty verdict or watch Minneapolis burn.”
Harker, a seasoned courtroom veteran, is at his best in reviewing the testimony and other evidence presented in Chauvin’s trial. Even during Chauvin’s trial, the prosecution’s theory of Floyd’s cause of death was a moving target, shifting from blood choke (or the impossibility of single carotid artery compression) to various forms of air choke (or what the prosecution called “positional asphyxia,” which Harker terms a “medley of nondescript and often conflicting theories”). The prosecution’s main witness to prove that Floyd’s death was caused by “positional asphyxia,” Dr. Martin Tobin, was an expert in sleep apnea who had never previously testified in a criminal case. Tobin testified for two full days. Tobin’s claim that Floyd was being deprived of oxygen prior to his death was belied by the fact that Floyd was recorded talking (at least 256 words) for five minutes after the 140-pound Chauvin placed his knee on Floyd’s shoulder blade. There was manifestly no blockage of Floyd’s airway, and, not surprisingly, no autopsy findings consistent with such a blockage.
Harker devotes many pages of his book to painstakingly dismantling Dr. Tobin’s convoluted—and dubious–testimony. Ultimately, Harker makes a convincing case that Chauvin was framed. The crux of any murder case is the cause of death. The prosecution managed to distance itself from the medical examiner’s original conclusion that Floyd died of a drug overdose with its fanciful theory of “positional asphyxia.” If, as Harker persuasively argues, Floyd died as a result of one or more documented factors, including coronary artery disease, hypertension, controlled substances, excited delirium, pulmonary edema, and cardiomegaly, criminal charges should never have been brought against Chauvin. The case was a Kafkaesque mockery of a judicial proceeding.
The prosecution’s own witness, a police department trainer of defensive tactics and the use of force by police officers, Lt. Johnny Mercil, testified that Chauvin’s placement of his knee on Floyd’s shoulder blade while Floyd was prone was an authorized technique that the Minneapolis Police Department routinely teaches officers to use. In subduing Floyd with his knee, Chauvin was doing exactly what he had been trained to do.
What killed George Floyd? The Chief Medical Examiner for Hennepin County, Dr. Andrew Baker, conducted Floyd’s autopsy. Dr. Baker concluded that Floyd died, not from asphyxia, but from cardiopulmonary arrest. Dr. Baker determined that Floyd had a lethal amount of fentanyl in his system, as well as an enlarged heart (due to Floyd’s chronic high blood pressure) and several coronary arteries showing substantial blockage, capable of causing sudden death. Dr. Baker also found that Floyd’s lungs were full of fluid (“pulmonary edema”), which was consistent with the high levels of fentanyl in Floyd’s system. Dr. Baker found no evidence to support the positional asphyxia theory.
Under political pressure from state AG Ellison’s office, however, and to preserve Chauvin’s sacrifice as a scapegoat, Dr. Baker’s findings were disregarded, as was the toxicology report that showed Floyd’s blood contained levels of fentanyl higher than the median fatal concentration, as well as high levels of methamphetamine and other substances. (The combination of fentanyl and methamphetamine is commonly called a “speedball.” Speedballs were found in the console of Floyd’s car and, with Floyd’s saliva on them, in a police car where Floyd had briefly been detained at the scene.)
Dr. Baker testified that if Floyd had died at home, alone in his locked residence, without other circumstances, the fentanyl level in his blood would warrant a conclusion that the cause of death was a drug overdose.
It took a lot of skullduggery prior to and during Chauvin’s six-week trial to obtain a phony conviction. In fact, Harker makes the case that Dr. Baker was brow-beaten and intimidated into altering his autopsy report to accommodate the prosecution’s baseless theory of “neck compression.” The lawfare waged against President Trump (and his lawyers) following the 2020 election, and the malicious impeachments against President Trump in his first term, opened Americans’ eyes to the reality that Democrats are willing to abuse the legal and political systems in order to maintain their power and punish their enemies.
Officer Derek Chauvin was a collateral casualty in this cruel new reality. When confronted by the Minneapolis police while sitting in his car on May 25, 2020, the already-drugged George Floyd consumed loose drugs in his possession, as he had a year earlier, to “destroy” the evidence. Having overdosed in this manner in 2019, and again in March 2020 (just two months previously to the Memorial Day incident, resulting in a five-day hospital stay), George realized that he faced a risk of overdose. Floyd even told the police “I ate too many drugs,” while resisting arrest.
Not only was there ample reasonable doubt to justify Chauvin’s acquittal, there was not sufficient evidence to warrant prosecuting him at all. The prosecutors admitted that Floyd was a long-time opioid addict, using this fact to argue that his resistance to fentanyl was high enough that he could tolerate a blood level of the drug that would be fatal to others. Floyd was hardly a sympathetic “victim.” Yet to the woke officials in Minnesota, Floyd would be celebrated as a hero and Chauvin would be sacrificed for the cause.
Ironically, the prosecution objected to the testimony of a witness, present in Floyd’s car at the time of the May 25, 2020 incident, who was the drug dealer that had sold Floyd the fatal speedball pills, and the ones that had caused an overdose two months earlier. The reason? The drug dealer would assert his Fifth Amendment rights. Harker caustically concludes: “Political considerations would not allow for the prosecution of a black drug dealer to replace or even supplement the prosecution of a white police officer for Floyd’s murder.” After deliberating for nine hours, the Minneapolis jury found Chauvin guilty on all counts. Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison. The conviction made state AG Keith Ellison a national figure. He won re-election in 2022.
The worst malefactors on the prosecution team were rewarded with judgeships. President Biden appointed Jerry W. Blackwell to a life-tenured seat on the federal district court in Minnesota. Gov. Tim Walz put Matt Frank on the state court bench.
American Scapegoat is sobering and dispiriting, but it is also riveting and illuminating. Derek Chauvin’s undeserved fate should haunt us all. We must not allow America to become a lawless hellhole like Minnesota.