Derek Chauvin Still Has To Do His Time... For Now

This would be even less of a problem if he was in jail for 1st degree murder.

Derek Chauvin (Image via Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office)

Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22 years in jail for an affront to God he spent eight minutes and 46 seconds committing in broad daylight. And it looks like he will serve the rest of his sentence out behind bars. Maybe.

Despite some believing that Chauvin’s actions fit the bill for first-degree murder — that is, “caus[ing] the death of a human being with premeditation and with intent to effect the death of the person or of another” — he was sentenced to felony murder because kneeling on a man’s neck for about how long it takes to listen to this 5 times was a third-degree battery.

I do not know how it went for you, but I, along with a couple other classmates at WashU (shoutout to this guy), thought that the doctrine surrounding felony murder was tenuous at best. And it never helps to see a child get charged with it. The only other topic that I remember being as controversial was the death penalty. And while I would be pro getting felony murder off the books, it would be very not good if Chauvin’s sentence gets reduced as a consequence. Collateral damage in a fight to address other evils in our justice system? Potentially. The event that springs this discussion is a recent Minnesota Supreme Court ruling on the mens rea for depraved heart murder that reduced the sentence of a Mohamed Noor, different cop who killed someone in the line of duty, by over half. Whatever may come of this, I just hope that George Floyd and his family are done justly.

The fact that this could happen is also a consequence of prosecutors doing their job knowing that there are so many “he should have stopped resisting” people out there that end up on the jury. Despite thinking that it’s bunk, I can at least see the argument that Chauvin was hit with a lesser charge for fear that this was the biggest thing that would stick. If only there were a way to chip away at some of the hero worship that surrounds being an officer. Yes, they have hard jobs, but they are public servants first, and I don’t think the difficulty of their vocation should be a defense to their actions in uniform. Imagine the public outrage that would ensue if it were discovered that fire fighters have had a longstanding acting-on-arson streak in between putting out fires. Would prosecutors worry about bringing charges against them? Or when a doctor does a medical oopsie, do prosecutors bring lesser crimes to bear because people like the white coats? I’d just like some consistency here. Am I the only one?

Tl;dr

  1. Minnesota’s Supreme Court decided that depraved heart’s mens rea requires a “generalized indifference to human life and cannot exist when the defendant’s conduct is directed with particularity at the person who is killed.”
  2. This clarification reduced the sentence of an officer who was charged with second-degree murder after shooting someone in the stomach.
  3. There is a worry that this could also reduce Chauvin’s sentencing, but the good news is he’s in jail largely because of a felony murder charge.
  4. The bad news is that the way Minnesota handles felony murder is on theoretically shaky ground. If it gets reinterpreted, Chauvin may have his sentence adjusted.

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The Minnesota Supreme Court Rejects the Legal Theory Underlying A Murder Charge Against Derek Chauvin [Reason]


Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. Before that, he wrote columns for an online magazine named The Muse Collaborative under the pen name Knehmo. He endured the great state of Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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