US desperately seeking justice in the trial of Derek Chauvin
The mistake is one that America’s news media has moved quickly to correct. It’s not “the George Floyd trial”. It’s the trial of Derek Chauvin.
The point is minor but important given that the proceedings that started this week have risked becoming “The George Floyd trial” in the public’s mind. The name of a victim rarely takes such prominence in a criminal case – there’s a good reason why Google returns “the Charles Manson trial” rather than the “Sharon Tate trial” by a ratio of four to one – yet there are exceptions. We had the “Rodney King trials” and Google returns over 2000 hits for the “Stephen Lawrence trial” but only five for the more correctly labelled “Dobson/Norris trial”. “The Bulger trial” is more famous than the “Thompson/Venables trial”.
The reason for these exceptions has less to do with poor English (none of these victims was ever on trial) than cultural forces that get somewhat in the way of the reporting. Plus we don’t always have a figure as obstinately willing to be unpopular as the late Lord Longford to remind us of the finer points of the law. In this case, it results in a tension that is palpable between the details of a man who died for allegedly using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill to buy cigarettes and what his death might say about systemic racism in US law enforcement. This still is “the George Floyd trial” but many other trials are going on here. One is called the “Derek Chauvin trial” but there might be another called “the Black Lives Matter trial” or “the trial of the media’s ability to report events objectively” or… well, pick your perspective and cast it as you will.
Subjectivity, bias, prejudice, presumption… They creep into even the best reporting. On the basis that you should never judge a writer on their headlines (which they generally don’t write), it would be wrong to read too much into the headline of Eugene Robinson’s latest for The Washington Post: “The world saw George Floyd’s final minutes. Now it will see whether he gets justice.” Robinson, meanwhile, is quite right to remind us that “Chauvin is the man on trial, not Floyd.”
He makes fine points – Robinson really is one of the best reporters out there – but some less fine. Talking about the defence’s reference to Floyd’s side, he argues that “throughout U.S. history, the idea of Black men as superhuman in their strength and subhuman in how they use it has been used to justify our restraint, our incarceration, our lynching.” To say it is a fair point would be to pick a side and overlook the other fair point which is that Floyd was objectively six feet four inches tall, which in the US puts him in the top one or two percentile. His size was always going to be a significant point of note.
Yet what can we say if everything we say is loaded? This is precisely why US news networks find themselves in such a difficult place, obliged to provide fair coverage of the trial of a police officer accused of the third-degree murder, yet aware that if there’s a story to tell, it’s a story that might sometimes run counter to the narrative played out in the media last summer, when the animus of the Black Lives Matter movement exploded across the US.
The nation enters, then, into the trial with various competing sets of cultural preconceptions that are almost impossible to dismiss, harder still to include. The first day of the trial was set aside for opening statements and establishing the competing strategies. The defence argued for nuance, the prosecution clarity.
George Floyd was killed because life is complicated, his team argue. The officers involved were weighing the threats posed by a crowd growing increasingly hostile. Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric Nelson, admitted that “The use of force is not attractive, but it is a necessary component of policing.” Yet then there were the damning words of the prosecutor, Jerry W. Blackwell, who described how Chauvin placed his knee on Floyd’s neck, “grinding and crushing him until the very breath — no, ladies and gentlemen, the very life — was squeezed out of him.”
Both arguments can be true or, at least, persuasive from a certain perspective and Judge Peter Cahill will have to walk a fine line to prevent the bigger context from impeding the process. What, after all, is on trial here? Is it the man, the system, or both? It certainly suits the defence to say the system is on trial. This, they will say, is about the wrongdoing of police who follow more aggressive tactics in black communities and Chauvin cannot be made the straw man for that vice. The system killed George Floyd, they’ll argue, and, in this twisted world, that means they make the very same arguments at many in the Black Lives Matter movement who see in this case a synecdoche for the history of violence towards black Americans. The prosecution, meanwhile, will seek retribution against one man, focussing on the individual rather than the systemic blight. In many respects, that feels like the justice that many might well demand, even if that verdict helps maintain the status quo. “Just another bad cop” could well be the ultimate verdict in the same way that every spree shooter is a symptom of some individual psychosis rather than a societal sickness.
The more one looks, the harder it is to guess what justice for George Floyd might eventually look like.