The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Did Derek Chauvin Get a Fair Trial?

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

A new documentary maintains that Derek Chauvin was not given a fair trial. We interview doc creator Liz Collin. In my view this is as much about the trial as it is the right to discuss it. You be the judge. Here is a folder of some docs, including the Minnesota training manual. I do NOT endorse or know the reliability of these studies. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10MnO6P-T6z5SVtveGKKACBuueJzU80Xf?usp=drive_link Doc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFPi3EigjFA&t=3414s Comments to [e-mail]

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to Live from the Table. I'm doing an interview today without my regular team. The guest today is Liz Collin, who is the producer of a new documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis, which takes on the Derek Chauvin story. I'm joined today also by a guy who's kind of become a friend of mine, although I never met him in person. I met him years ago during the Arbery case. His name is Lawrence Zimmerman. He's a defense attorney out of Atlanta. He's often on MSNBC and stuff like that, correct? And I have him here because obviously we're going to touch on legal matters, and my worst nightmare is ever to say something unbelievably stupid on this show

and have egg on my face and have it exist for my great-great-great-grandchildren to see on the Internet. So we don't want to do that. Okay, so I just want to say up front when I first saw George the George Floyd video I had the same reaction that any normal person had

I thought this was a cold-blooded murder I think I referred to it as it reminded me of a Nazi murder I was you know completely outraged it caused me to rethink

some ideas that I had about the way the world worked. And then little facts began to come out which, based on my law school education, troubled me. Things which I knew in a law school class would have been a reason for long discussions. And at some point, I felt that if this whole case had been a law school hypothetical, maybe 100% of the people in my law school class would have felt that the trial was unfair. But this was during COVID, during the peak of cancel culture, and you could not talk about it.

And this was extremely disturbing to me as someone who likes to talk about everything and feels it's crazy that you can't talk about things. Even I, who's pretty fearless, I never brought it up on my show. Not to my credit, I never brought it up on my show. I brought it up privately to a lot of journalists that I knew and they all looked at me with blank stares

and nobody wanted to touch it with a 10-foot pole. But there were issues. And let me also say that if Chauvin is guilty and gets a fair trial, I hope he rots in prison. I have no sympathy for anybody who kills somebody, let alone a policeman who has that authority to

kill someone. I've seen police my whole life behave arrogantly. I've seen police brutality. I am not, I'm certainly not a hater of the police but I'm not naive to the realities of what people in uniforms, young do. I'm not naive to the reality of how they become inured to the day-to-day risking of their lives

the day-to-day violence. There's so many things which go into the unpretty picture of what exists within policing alongside the heroism and the devotion to the public. It's all true. So I'm almost to wrap this up. So, but this ties together now. I think we are seeing a little bit of the ice break on this idea that you can't talk about things.

And certainly, after seeing the dry academic way that these Ivy League and MIT college presidents were ready to be open to the idea that discussing the genocide of Jews, you know, might or might not be within context a perfectly reasonable thing to bring up on campus. And by the way, I lean very much towards that notion of free speech. The idea that you can't talk about the defects in a trial of Derek Chauvin is just more than I can take. If you can talk dryly about the notion of genocide of Jews, we can talk about the Derek Chauvin trial without calling anybody a racist

or without the sky falling. It's true. An entire ideology, an entire world movement was built on the column, like the plinth of this being a murder. So many people are not going to want to be open to it.

But I would just say that, you know, the cause of justice exists, you know, it floats in the air. It doesn't need Derek Chauvin to be one way or the other for the notion that everybody should be treated fairly, that the police should be humane, and all these things are correct. But criminal justice is, more than anything, a matter of procedure.

All the great miscarriages of justice come down to a lack of respect for proper procedure in the courtroom. We know that humans are incapable of seeing their own biases. That's why we have double-blind experiments. We can't even trust a well-intentioned doctor to examine whether a drug is or isn't working if he knows whether the patient's gotten the drug. It cannot be controlled. And that's why procedure is,

we should cling to procedure at all costs. And procedure seems to be much of the issue here. So that's my opening spiel. I don't want to, you know, that's why I want people to understand where I'm coming from. I'm not soft on violence. clue it in on the fact that you were married to someone who was in charge of the police association. Let's just get that on the table now so nobody accuses us of hiding it, and then we get into the documentary. Go ahead.

No, and actually, it's usually how I start interviews. It's certainly not a secret. It never has been. But I was a longtime Minneapolis news anchor and reporter when this happened on May 25th, 2020. I'm a Minnesota native kid who grew up in this state and sort of landed the dream job at the highest rated station here in the Twin Cities and worked there for years. And I had been married for several years by the time that this happened to a Minneapolis police lieutenant. He was serving as the president of the police union at the time that this happened. So obviously I had a lens into things from his side, obviously being privy to a lot of information, but really more so than anything, I was so troubled as a journalist

about what was happening, what we were not passing on to the public, even though we were aware of these facts in the case. I can go into some of those to start with, or if you want to just get a scene setter, that's where I am now. I left mainstream media to jump into independent media. I put out a book last year called They're Lying, The Media, The Left, and the Death of George Floyd, and that's what led to this documentary that's been out for about a month now. All right. And by the documentaries on YouTube, it's on Rumble. I also want to get to speak to you about why places like Netflix or Amazon are not running it because obviously there's huge interest. But OK, what was the first fact that came across your desk, as it were, that made you say, uh-oh, there's more here than meets the eye?

This is the very first time that the body camera footage in any critical incident in Minneapolis had been withheld, not only from the public, from the police union as well, that it was locked down from the beginning. And I would say that the evidence basically shows as to why that was. There was clearly a lot more to this interaction with George Floyd instead about two and a half months later that it was made available and I should say made available but that was only if you would go to the Hennepin County

Courthouse basically view it for yourself uh... and it was on YouTube too right I saw stuff on YouTube international news agency that leaked it two and a half months later. But then it was eventually available, connected to court filings and such. But it was a very long time. I still, to this day, think that if they went frame by frame to this entire interaction, this body camera footage, and gave more context, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation today. This is where you have George Floyd complaining that he can't breathe before Derek Chauvin arrives on scene.

He's denying taking anything. These rookie officers are asking, what did you take, man? Nothing. He has pills, what appear to be pills in his mouth that he puts in. That's why he's not showing his hands and complying with officers from the very beginning. You also have Thomas Lane very clearly on camera calling for an ambulance, 36 seconds. So let me stop you there. So let me just, let's go step by step. And by the way, there's going to be a part at the end where

you and I might part company where Floyd is pretty much unresponsive and he's still on his stomach. But let's just leave that aside. So what I learned from the body camera, and I don't remember the order in which I learned things, but I do remember when I saw that footage and I think that's what you're getting at. I said, oh, he's screaming, I'm going to die, I can't breathe

before anybody ever lays a hand on him. And that for the first time gave me a possible understanding of why they seemed so unconcerned about the fact that he's screaming, I can't breathe. Now that's not to say that that's an excuse for them not taking it seriously. Maybe he couldn't breathe in the car and he continues to not be able to breathe when he was on his stomach. You know, this is what a trial would have to go into. But it did explain that they had become, they weren't taking him seriously. Is that correct? Because he'd been screaming all along about the same things. Is that what you're getting at? He'd been talking for a very long time. Again, this is about an 18-minute interaction in total with George Floyd, who has a lot to say during that entire time. And it's obviously clear that officers did not recognize that he was in medical distress, even though they were asking. However,

you could also argue that they then are calling for an ambulance because they recognize something is going on again 36 seconds after George Floyd himself asks to be laid on the ground just to jump ahead not only is the body camera footage kind of a red flag for me as a journalist but it's the very next day where you have the mayor the police chief I think pushing a very dangerous and divisive narrative that is not backed up by fact in this case, including the fact, just a fact of the case, they're saying whatever is happening out there at 38th and Chicago, it's not a part of police training. Minneapolis police are not trained that way. And I go online and there's a police manual that's been there for years, an online

document. And there are two pages that are just mysteriously gone from that manual the very next day. And those pages reappear about three weeks later and they address what's called the maximal restraint technique or the MRT, which again, if you watch the body camera footage, you hear the officers clearly discuss in that body camera footage. So one would ask, why are they manipulating this message very early on? So let me say, go ahead, go ahead, Lawrence, go ahead. Sort of a little bit of a bigger picture question. So like I said, I do a lot of work with local news for years. And the local reporters I know in Atlanta who work for mainstream media, they are dogged about getting information, investigating cases, I mean, getting to the bottom of stuff.

I mean, great reporting, right? Investigative reporting. When you say mainstream media, I'm not confused, but what is it? Why would mainstream media not, reporters I know, not want to get to the bottom of the information and then release that to the public. It's an excellent question. I spent 20 years in mainstream media and certainly saw it change over the years, which is why I left for independent media. And I detail a lot of these examples in my book, and I could rattle off many different storylines that we withheld from the public and did not properly inform

them on. And sadly, it's the direction that the mainstream media has gone. This isn't me just saying this as an opinion. I witnessed it for myself working for a CBS station. Instead of caring about the facts of this case, they're setting mandates at the CBS station where I work that half of the people we interview have to be non-white or from a protected class. So things like that. We're implementing racism. We're controlling what the kind of words we're using. We can't refer to them as riots that transpire in Minneapolis. They're protests

or peaceful protests. Again, I could go on and on about how the message was heard. It's the editors, basically. I've heard other reporters tell me that they want a certain amount of non-white reporters. They want, we can't use you this week because they want a female. You know, so I've heard that talk also when it comes to these on-air personalities as well. Let me just, so I will, after the case i will put in in the video certain pictures so let's just to uh expand on your point about the manual because most people still don't know this there was a picture in that manual that shows a policeman with his knee i don't want to say the word shoulder blades or neck whatever because this is this is a point of contention but the picture in the manual is almost identical to the picture of Chauvin on George Floyd such that you have to look at it carefully to to know whether you're looking at the George Floyd thing

I think the guy in the manual is white on the ground and that and that's the clue but it's it's obvious you know it's almost identical and when you you see that, you're gobsmacked. Oh my God, this is not Chauvin's signature move. That was the phraseology they were using on CNN. This was a move which he was taught to use. The manual describes it as non-lethal. However, the manual does say at a certain point you're supposed to roll him over

onto his side to avoid positional asphyxia, which then becomes another issue in the case. But you would have thought, so for instance, let me just say one other thing. During the OJ trial, we heard long explanations

and credulous discussions of the most ridiculous theories of the defense. The Colombian was a Colombian necktie. You know, anything that came out of Johnny Cochran's mouth, no matter how ridiculous it was, it was perfectly OK to discuss it. And nobody accused you of being soft on what was obviously the murder of Nicole Brown and Simpson and Goldman. But in this case, you did not really, it gets back to the mainstream media, you would have thought you would have had experts on every network with that manual saying, this is the manual.

This is clearly something he was taught to do. The question is, did he follow it to the letter? Was there a problem with... You can imagine a million issues. It's in the manual. He sees the picture. There's also writing. Was he trained on the picture? Was he trained on the writing?

What did he know? What didn't he know? What's negligence on part of the police force in their training? There's a million issues that immediately popped to your head as soon as you realize, oh my God, in some way this guy might have thought he was doing exactly what he was trained to do. That never came through, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And you bring up the rolling to the side. Actually, in the manual itself, they're not using the hobble, which is a device that would connect basically George Floyd's legs to his handcuffs. They're actually downgrading force because they're recognizing something is going on rapidly. And this is also when a couple minutes after Thomas Lane calls the ambulance and nobody is arriving on scene, even though it should take just a minute or two because the fire station is just a couple blocks away. That's when you have them calling again for an ambulance, wondering where that ambulance is. But again, this very problematic EMS response is not a part of the trial either.

And I think that, you know, to answer that question, certainly fear permeated the air. It didn't take too long before, you know, the riots began in Minneapolis. Those, you know, so-called peaceful protests quickly turned. But I also think that's because these so-called leaders in Minnesota withheld a lot of this information from the public and made this into something that it simply was not. And also in the manual, it talks about that you're supposed to be on the lookout for excited delirium. Now, Lawrence will tell us excited delirium, this notion that people of particular age profile, perhaps on drugs, might have superhuman strength. I think it uses that phrase such that they would still be an extreme threat to a police officer, even in handcuffs.

Many people have discredited this notion. I think it's fair to say that the majority opinion is that excited delirium is not a real thing. However, he was trained to be concerned about excited delirium. You hear him in the transcript say to his partner, I'm worried about excited delirium. And by the way, I also saw there was a news story, I just saw it yesterday, where Minnesota and state agreed to revamp policing post-Floyd. This was some commission changing the training, and it says one of the quotes,

and training in the disputed condition of excited delirium, a key issue in the confrontation that led to Floyd's death. So, in other words, after the trial, Minnesota is now taking steps to make sure that they don't train their officers in excited delirium, which in a sense is a tacit admission that the fact that

they were training them led to what Chauvin did. But Chauvin is in jail maybe for the rest of his life. No. Let Lawrence in as the lawyer. I'm sorry, Liz. Go ahead go ahead go ahead last well i actually excited to learn aside i just want to give you my own anecdote my own personal experience represented a police officer several years ago that there's a hit and run and he

exceeded the speed limit by 40 miles an hour to get to the scene lost control to someone cut in front of him and he killed somebody. All right? At the time, the policy was you can't, for this level of quality, you can only go a certain speed. Well, after this happened, he was fired, but then they changed the policy, which alluded to me, it's okay for him going that speed to respond to the hit and run. He got the case dismissed, but he was charged with vehicular homicide and murder and lost his job.

Similar thing. So now Minnesota's doing the same thing. Their officer is trained on excited delirium, and now they're getting rid of it. But he was trained on that. But to the other point that hasn't dropped in about excited delirium yet, it's been debunked. I mean, you can't – no one becomes the Incredible Hulk. I mean, certainly you get crazy, all your adrenaline, and you can fight as hard as you're ever going to fight. But you don't all of a sudden become the hopeless or Superman.

That's not true. But police officers are trained to believe it's something that's true. That's a fact. It's in the manual. Yeah. So Liz, go ahead. What'd you want to say? I was just going to say that, you know, not only do you bring up that, um, just the timeline

piece, uh, MRT was actually a part of training up until just a few months ago. They finally got rid of it after putting it back online three weeks after the incident. So again, there's just much to say there. And also you have this autopsy with George Floyd that's conducted 12 hours after his death that finds no strangulation, no asphyxiation. I could go on about the autopsy itself, but again, that is withheld from the public, whereas other high-profile cases, they would have released that a lot sooner. Instead, it's released on the same day that George Floyd's family releases their autopsy, and you have the media touting that as an independent autopsy, which they say in a press

conference that basically George Floyd died from what you see in the video. And the only person to ever have possession of George Floyd's body to ever do a physical examination of George Floyd himself was Dr. Andrew Baker, the Hennepin County medical examiner. So one would say that that is really the only official autopsy. Have you been able to find or talk to anybody or get any information about who was directing people not to release information? Any emails, texts, phone calls, anything? Have you tried to hunt that down? I'm sure you have. Lawrence, I'm going to send you a copy of my book. Yes. There's quite a bit of information there. It's all public documentation. There's basically notes that go back and forth between prosecutors and the Hennepin County medical examiner over the course of that week as you see this narrative start to change when it comes to his autopsy.

So it's so difficult for them to um to think about of course you know people who are not as i once heard somebody say people who are not burdened by a law school education have trouble thinking about things in terms of reasonable doubt and when you see a guy with his knee on you know where on the back of a guy who then expires it's very difficult to imagine that that's that didn't kill him and then when you hear somebody try to poke holes in that it's angering like what are you what? This guy, we saw it. He killed him. But the legal standard is much more difficult. And the legal standard is that we have to know beyond any doubt, beyond any reasonable doubt that he killed him.

So here was the problem with that. First of all, the initial autopsy. You correct me if I'm getting it wrong. A lot of this is from memory. I have some notes. But the initial autopsy found no evidence of asphyxiation. The first expert in the trial was an MMA fighter who said it was a blood choke, which was essentially total asphyxiation. Then another guy, Smock, called it positional asphyxia. Now, positional asphyxia is very important because positional asphyxia is what the manual is concerned about.

And when it tells the cops at some point to turn them over on their side, such that if they didn't die of positional asphyxia, then not following that procedure may not even matter anymore. Because, yes, you were supposed to remind his side but it's not really relevant to the death then another another expert said he died of something

with the neck but it wasn't the chest it wasn't positional asphyxia so you have a number of different explanations of how he might have died. Some of them are mutually exclusive of each other. And then, of course, he had enough fentanyl in his system to have also warranted a diagnosis, whatever you call it, a conclusion of overdose if there had been no other facts. So I imagined it this way. If I go to one doctor and he tells me the reason you're having this symptom is this, another doctor tells me the reason your symptom is this, another one tells you the reason your symptom is this, and they can't all be true,

I would say that each one of them, I'm entitled to see reasonable doubt. And then if there's a fourth explanation, which is certainly plausible, 5% chance, 10% chance, which is drug overdose, you have a really tough thing on your hands if you want to put somebody in jail. As opposed to all the experts saying, yes, there was a hole in his vein and he bled out and that was from, you know, we see the bruise, that was from his knee. No problem, right?

And I would also just add, we saw something that happened in the news with this guy, Brian Sicknick. I don't know if you guys know who this is. This was the cop at the January 6th riot who died the next day. And there was some talk that maybe he got hit, didn't get hit, whatever it is.

And everybody was sure, I was sure, he died as a complication of whatever it was that he dealt with on January 6th. And a couple months later, the Washington Post did a story, said, nope, the autopsy showed his death was completely unrelated to whatever he dealt with on January 6th. My only point being that things do happen. Weird coincidences do happen.

People who take enough drugs to die might certainly die while they're being arrested. And actually, the manual also talks about this, that people have, I think there was an illegal opinion in the manual, that people have heart attacks sometimes in the stress of these situations. So, you know, how do we know for sure? How do we know? I don't know if you have any comments on all this. It's very disturbing, right?

Very disturbing. Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said about that original autopsy. In fact, the word homicide doesn't even appear on the very first document. You have Dr. Baker document many of these things you mentioned three times. In fact, the lethal amount of fentanyl in his system along with methamphetamine. Also, you know, pretty severe blockage to his heart. He has a pelvic tumor that many have said required a lot more testing. In fact, many people that we sort of wanted to look over all the documents kind of described, sadly, George Floyd

as a ticking time bomb. There was a lot going on. But yet, you know, sort of this message is sold to the public that he was a healthy young man. Those are the words by his attorney, of course, used about a week later. And sadly, the evidence shows that was just simply not the case. Lawrence, do you have anything you want to add to what I said as a lawyer? Yeah, no, I mean, I agree with what you're saying. It's the narrative. We hear one thing and then, you know, then people start questioning what's true between both. And that's sort of where things start getting lost. And, I mean, that autopsy is the autopsy.

At the time, you know, you're talking about a county medical examiner. What's his motive to lie and make all that up? I mean, it's just, I haven't heard what's his motive. What is he, does he get paid more money? I mean, is there a smoking gun? Well, Liz, tell us about this deposition where somebody reported that he had said something that would be bad for his career. What was that? Yeah, that was actually just made public recently in some depositions connected to another case. But you have Dr. Baker basically saying, well, it's a Hennepin County prosecutor recounting a conversation that she had with Dr. Baker just the very next day after the death of George Floyd.

He comes back pretty quickly after conducting the autopsy. And he says, you know, what happens if this doesn't match up with the public narrative? This is the kind of case that ends careers. And also in some grand jury proceedings, Dr. Baker is asked if he is facing any pressure for coming to a certain conclusion with George Floyd's autopsy, and he doesn't answer the question. He asks to first consult with his legal team. He asks to speak to his lawyer first and comes back two hours later and then answers the question and does say no.

He did not face any pressure. So there's quite a bit there. So the quote from this thing, it says, I don't know anything about the case where this deposition comes from, but the line is, he said to me, I guess he is Baker. Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn't match up with the public narrative that everyone's already decided on? Now, that's a hell of a quote. Now, it's hearsay to some. It is hearsay. So, you know, it would be nice to have Baker do an interview where he explained that he didn't say that or what he meant by it.

But it's also telling that he, I believe it's telling, he knows this is out there now. And he hasn't chosen to say, no, no, that's not true. I didn't say that. Or no, no, no, that's not what I meant. He's stayed silent about it, which usually means something, right? He didn't clear his name on that. In this case, it was the perfect storm of events. We'll go into all that.

But between his health, the ambulance not coming, everything just transpired. A lack of experience with some of the officers. It was all a perfect storm. Now, there's other things here. There was a juror who was wearing a shirt prior to the, was it voir dire? Is that what you call it? Prior to being interviewed, they had a picture of him wearing a shirt that says, Get your knee off my neck or something like that. I think it was a Black Lives Matter shirt he was wearing.

Black Lives Matter. So it also had a picture of Martin Luther King. And this is how crazy things were. So this issue came up and CNN had an editorial. I sent it to Lawrence yesterday where somebody says, how dare somebody think that wearing a Martin Luther King shirt means that you have a bias about the George Chauvin show. The editorial did not address the fact that the shirt also says, get your knee off my neck. Now, just imagine Trump is on trial now. People hate Trump. If somebody was wearing a shirt that says, implied that January 6th, that the election was a hoax or January 6th, and then was going to be on the Trump jury, people who hate Trump would

be outraged by that. You see, you can't have a guy wearing a t-shirt like, this is basic to America. Let's go Brandon t-shirt. How about that one? Yeah, or any shirt which shows that the person has a strong view, ideological view, about the case he's about to decide on where the rest of somebody's life is hanging in the balance. You can't even wear – victims' families aren't even allowed to wear pins with the victims' families' face in the gallery during a trial. So, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's never allowed into the court. It's supposed to be as pure as possible.

And then, of course, we all knew and worried. I mean, to be honest, in my heart of hearts, I was glad. I don't say this with any—I'm not proud of saying this, but it's true. I was glad that Chauvin was convicted because I was worried my business would burn down. I didn't know what was happening. My hope was that he would be convicted and then there would be some sort of appeals process where justice would be done. But we all knew that an acquittal here was going to blow the lid off horrible things. And in Minneapolis especially, one can't even imagine a juror or 12 jurors being ready to face their peers in Minneapolis, having let Derek Chauvin off.

And yet we, we pretended that that pressure didn't exist. There was no change of venue. And I mean, how could, if there were, if this was not a case for a change of venue, what is a change of venue for? Why wasn't there a change of venue, what is a change of venue for?

Why wasn't there a change of venue, Liz? Yeah, so I think there's quite a bit to say about the judge in this case, Peter Cahill. He made what many have considered questionable rulings in this case. Again, not so much what the jury was allowed to see, but what they were not, including a lot of that body camera footage, including the MRT, the maximal restraint technique, that actual training slide. But, yes, absolutely, he did not grant a change of venue here. This happens 10 months after the worst rioting in history, just a few miles away in Minneapolis. So each and every day, the jury also is not sequestered.

That was something he didn't grant as well. So the jury each and every day is paraded inside this courthouse, that there's barbed wire surrounding, there are National Guardsmen standing guard, many different protests and whatnot that are happening outside the courthouse. So we have a pretty long conversation in the fall of Minneapolis in the documentary itself with Derek Chauvin's current attorney who is handling his appeal. But they did appeal on that very issue, the whole change of venue case, saying this should have been taking place in nowhere, Minnesota, where they didn't have this severe rioting and such. But the judge felt that everybody saw this video in this case, so everybody in the state basically was well aware of the facts that they decided on in this case,

so he felt why not just continue in Hennepin County. But did they ever address people in nowhere Minnesota may not have felt as much pressure by the level of publicity and the threats of riots. Was that addressed? Not from what I've really been able to see. There's a lot, we actually, for people to look at this themselves and they can see everything themselves, it's all at thefallofminneapolis.com.

We've posted all of our research, including all of these rulings and whatnot. But in many ways, I would say that the script was sort of written very early on here. You also have a $27 million settlement that's awarded to George Floyd's family during jury selection in Derek Chauvin's trial. What's that? That was crazy. That was crazy that that was released in public. And the jurors knew about that and were not sequestered, correct? Yeah, in fact, there's a couple of jurors who kind of say that they can't do this after that is awarded,

and they're quickly dismissed. But, yeah, just the timing of all this. You also have the Hennepin County Courthouse, I should say, for the very first time is shut down. There's nothing else happening there they give two floors of the courthouse to the prosecution in this case that's how many people were working uh on the prosecution so they're given two floors of the actual uh building and uh there's no trial that is allowed to to proceed during this entire time they have they They had prosecutors getting help from law firms. I've never seen law firms helping prosecutors in a county case before. That's unheard of.

I want to say a word on behalf of Lawrence Zimmerman here, just so people understand who he is. I asked him to join because he has a history of being very good on racial matters. I think it's fair to say civil rights has always been a major concern of his. The reason I first came into contact with him is because he was outraged about the Arbery killing. he is not someone who's tolerant in any way or difficult to convince of racial motivations and things like that. And I asked him to join because I expected him

to push back much harder than I would if there was a case to be made. And it's a credit to your documentary that after seeing it, he was persuaded in some way that this trial had not been what he initially thought. That was not the reaction I expected from him. It is not – I don't want anybody to think, oh, he's the type of person that I could have predictably expected that kind of reaction from. It was the opposite. I asked him because I expected that if anybody would have seen the flaws in this documentary and would have been disposed to not

want to accept what it was saying, it would have been Lawrence. So, and you can look at his record and you can Google him online and you, and you'll see, this is not, he's not, he's not a shill here. The documentary is, is pretty powerful. Well,

I know. No, it's your point. I started watching the documents. The first 25 minutes, I started emailing them, you know, after one,

after another about this is BS, blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden I started watching more like, wait, no, these are good points. And then at the end I was like, wow, this is really a good documentary. This is, she really has convinced me that I'm not saying, you know,

Chauvin's guilty or innocent, but certainly, you know, it's their trial. That's what I came away with. So I think it's well put together. When I first heard about it, I wasn't going to watch it. I wasn't expecting to watch it. I wasn't expecting to even think it was anything of value. But to me, it's very valuable and very well done. Now, by the way,

there is two or three studies out there, which I don't know if they really were addressed, that say that positional asphyxia is not actually a real concern i don't know they're peer-reviewed to some extent i don't know whether they're legit not legit i'm putting this aside because i'm going to refer to them in a second um and then of course there are these few minutes after George Floyd is not responsive where it's difficult to say what's the matter.

As soon as you see he's not responsive, you need to get off him and see what's going on there. And one imagines that he might have been negligent there. It may not have been causative, but something has gone wrong there, it looks to me. So I'm not ready to say he's innocent. Certainly not ready to say he wasn't innocent of a negligent homicide of some kind. But, yeah, I think they're absolutely, I don't know if it's possible, he needs a proper trial where the issues of causation are properly gone through where the issue of positional asphyxia is properly considered before a jury with expert testimony he should he i mean

this is can't be a requirement he should really take the stand um and in in now maybe in a calmer atmosphere, I just wish there was some hook that we could have him retried so that these issues can be addressed so that we can know that our system was thorough and fair. Is that possible? Is there any chance of that? Well, you had the Minnesota State Supreme Court deny his appeal, and then the U.S. Supreme Court actually did just about four days after we put out the documentary. They did as well. There are some other issues. They've appealed already on this tumor situation, basically saying that more testing was needed and that Derek Chauvin's own defense attorney did not acknowledge those issues.

So something likely will come of that and a ruling will have to come down. But there's also some hope, I should say, for the three other officers. They all pled guilty after seeing what happened in Derek Chauvin's trial. They thought there's no way they could get a fair trial in Hennepin County. And they faced, you know, 10 or 15 year sentences themselves. They're serving anywhere from three to five years, those three officers. But we have now the documents that show that the Hennepin County prosecutors did not want to charge the three other officers at all. They said morally and ethically they did not feel comfortable bringing charges against them. And this is when you see the attorney general in the case, Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, sort of swoop in and take over the prosecution. So there's more of that that has come out recently that we've uncovered. So I think that, you know, there could be an appeal working with their cases, because why would they have pled guilty if, you know, this team of people never even wanted to

charge them criminally in the first place? And again, they were charged with aiding and abetting murder. But also just speaking to this race issue, and I think that, you know, it's kind of a point of the film, too, that, you know, you have Alex King, an officer who is black, who arrests George Floyd. He himself talks about how he didn't fit the narrative, so of course he was never really talked about in the media and such. And I think that's why we wanted to do this documentary too, because here we are three years later paying the consequences really for all of these lies all across the country. And I think it obviously would have taken some strong leadership to stand up in the wake of all of this.

And here are the facts. Again, maybe there would have been criminal charges and whatnot, but it just simply did not have to happen the way it did if they would have just been transparent. This is what they say they always are. What's the point of having body camera footage if you're not going to actually uh release it um but but they decided instead to to hide it and manipulate this

this message and i think for a reason let me say then i'll let you laurence so one thing we we totally forgot to mention and it's very very important that the picture of i think we forgot to mention the picture in the manual showing the hold with the knee on the top of the shoulder blades and neck was redacted from the jury. The man, Chauvin, or none of them, I guess, was not even given the right to show the jurors, look, this is the picture they gave me. So the jury wasn't allowed to have the mental insight that all of us had when we saw that.

Oh shit, that's why he did that. He did that because they taught him to do that. Now in law school, this is a very important point, maybe Lawrence can talk about this too. The prosecution and defense are not two sides of a coin. The defendant is innocent. much latitude, we entitle him to say and present whatever he feels

is necessary to prove his innocence. Because he's on trial for his life. The prosecution is a much higher standard the prosecution has to meet, because in terms of the evidence that they can produce,

because they can use innuendo they can be prejudicial there's all sorts of things which we don't want the prosecution to do to an innocent man but when you're on trial for your liberty unless we have a very very good reason we let you present whatever you think is in your interest. This is your life you're defending here. For a man who's accused of killing somebody by putting his knee on the neck of somebody, not to be able to show the picture from his training manual where he was taught to do that and then, this is in your documentary, his superiors go on the stand and testify no he wasn't trained to do that which isn't that perjury i mean it's it and i keep thinking there

must be something i don't understand here because yes it's clear they were trained to do that i mean i think well maybe the documentary isn't edited properly maybe that's not the actual question like it's so outrageous you know what is going on here but i haven't been able to see it so he's not allowed to present this picture the jury never knows it was in the manual like that and then when they try to elicit it from his superiors the superiors deny it is this really what happened is this what goes on and what i mean you know when you see that happening, my goodness, you can only imagine how this same kind of corruption

is used to put black people in jail. Like, this is not just a one-time thing. This is a rot. This is a fucking rot within a system here that something like this can go on. I don't know who wants to address that. It's very upsetting to me. Of course it happens.

I mean, you know, you may remember from your lawful days of evidence, there's a rule 403, what's relevant evidence, right? Something has to be relevant, probative to the case. And the judge does a balance and determines whether it's prejudicial, whether it comes in or not. And why, obviously, the defense thinks certainly that part of the manual be absolutely relevant the judge makes a decision says it's not relevant for whatever reasons now i don't know the ruling was there that doesn't make any sense oh i know

what the ruling was well i know the ruling was but i don't know what the reasoning behind it was well i right i don't know what was in his mind i don't know what the written reasoning was but if he's just saying well because we don't know whether it was mine. I don't know what the written reasoning was. But if he's just saying, well, because we don't know whether he was actually trained on it, but that was the manual that was in place when he was being trained, that would certainly seem relevant. Now, maybe it begs the question as to why. I would then wonder why Chauvin would have been forced to testify at that point, because certainly you would have wanted him to testify that I did learn this. Here's the manual. That's his decision about not him to testify that I did learn this. Here's the manual. That was,

you know, that was their, that's his decision about not wanting to testify. But we see it happen in courtrooms all the time. Unfortunately, no, um, famous case here in Georgia that I was involved with Ross Harris, hot car case.

I mean, that case was reversed, uh, last year because a lot of evidence was let in by the judge. The prosecutor wanted to present that had nothing to do with the death of his child. So of course, unfortunately what i see a lot is when the prosecution wants to get in whatever they want the prop the judge allows it or the defense wants something to come in to help somebody who's innocent or even guilty doesn't make a difference something that helps their case

a lot of judges keep it out so so the appeal the appeal on this particular point, I read the decision, and the reasoning is just awful to me. They upheld the decision to redact it for the following two reasons. The first reason was that they couldn't prove that Derek Chauvin had ever seen that picture. So one would have to presume that this was just a coincidence,

that somehow he magically improvised a hold, and it's not a natural hold. That's precisely, precisely the picture in the book. And then it says, but even if he had seen it, the manual also says to turn him on his side into the recovery position. So it doesn't matter it's it

it's not prejudicial to chauvin but of course but i don't want to sorry to cut you off that will speak to is more than if that's true if he didn't turn him over that'd be more of a negligent homicide then so maybe it'll be relevant but yes and if he did that's right. Number one. And number two is that that presumes that he died for the reason that turning him over was to prevent. And we don't know that. That's a matter of fact for the jury to determine. So this is a logically flawed reasoning by the Minnesota Appellate Court that my 10-year-old could understand. And I'm not exaggerating. My 10-year-old could understand, maybe even on his own without me prodding him, why that reasoning was awful. I don't even, I mean, I keep saying

myself, am I missing something? Is there some other side to it? This is just, it doesn't hold up. I don't want to see a murderer go free. I'm not like, this is nothing about the case. But again, if this is a law school class and that picture was redacted and this was a final exam hypothetical, 100% of the students would have said reversible error. And 100% of the students would have said, no, this is a bullshit explanation by the appellate judge. You would not have had any dissent. Maybe 90%. Well, I don't think so.

Yeah, you also had Judge Cahill say he wasn't going to allow this in court because they could not find that Derek Chauvin last signed in his name for training. So therefore they could not prove that Derek Chauvin last signed in his name for training. So therefore, they could not prove that he was ever trained. However, we found these manuals that dated as far back as 1993. He'd been an officer for 19 years. And there's actually video of him doing this exact same maneuver on other people in the past.

So, I mean, I think you're right. I think this is one of the most outrageous points in the past. So, I mean, I think you're right. I think this is one of the most outrageous points in the movie and why I called, you know, the book They're Lying, because I just kept shouting that for months on end at the television watching the trial, et cetera. Lawrence? Well, I'm just going to sort of shift to a different topic for a second. Sure, go ahead.

I mean, you know, there's definitely obviously a lot of racial components, a lot of the stuff I see is police brutality, but I also see more of a power dynamic is really what it is for me. I see brutality of a lot of people by the police, white, black, Hispanic. I think it's also more of a lot of it it comes to power it's a power dynamic you see black officers hurt black people um and you know what is the beginning of your with the documentary you show this is where it started at the beginning i sort of stepped because you see the officers immediately rip open floyd's door point a gun to his head and start cursing at him get out of the

car get out of the car i mean to me the officer started that in the wrong manner to begin with. Here you have is just a fake, whatever it was. I mean, Lawrence, I don't mean to interrupt you, but he was refusing to show his hands. And in the interview with Thomas Lane, he can see his arm going back. So that's why he points his gun. It wasn't, that's not how he approached the vehicle. And also, you have to remember, these are a couple of rookie police officers. And I think if you watch that entire interaction, they're willing to roll the window down for him. They're asking him again and

again, what's he on? Some would say that that interaction with George Floyd went on a really long time because they were very accommodating to to to everything that that he wanted to do so uh just from the they pulled his door open immediately and they were just it all happened so quickly i we had you had the video from that officer creighton i think from the year before floyd and floyd is also acting very similar but he was a lot more um he acted a lot differently and he escalated the situation as best as he could he didn't say oh'll just take your time he's a lot more calm i'm just saying sometimes we see the police officers escalate instead of the escalator the whole thing starts spiraling you have floyd who's obviously under the influence of something freaking out and it all just went obviously sideways and if it is

unfortunate tragic death but then i mean i'll just take a little bit umbridge because that's what you know originally i was going to plan on doing. But, you know, you also talk about Floyd's record. We had Floyd through the beginning of the documentary, all his past history. You know, in most states, that wouldn't even be admissible as evidence, his past record, unless the person knew about the record, because they'd have no basis to take action. So if I didn't know you were a violent person or you were arrested for terrorism, I'd have no basis to take action so if i didn't know you were a violent person or you're arrested for terrorism i'd have no reason to all of a sudden start acting defensive with you because i didn't know that's in your history so i you know i understand i understand as somebody who's selling a movie why you put it put that in there but

i'm not selling a movie we actually we actually went ahead and offered the movie for free. So it's a really good business strategy. I don't mean that as a knock. I was just saying, you're putting together a movie, so you're marketing it. Either way. I would say that issue is relevant to the viewer.

You know, to get the whole content. It's a story about the whole thing. It has nothing to do with three soft transactions. That's not relevant. Look, go i guess i guess i would say i just want to make the point that the reason his history is in uh the documentary itself is because we are showing that he clearly uh had a lot of interactions with police and again if you play the 2019 video uh to the 2020 video the interaction with police, it's almost identical. And everything he's saying about his mom dying, about certain complaints that he can't breathe, he's struggling, they're almost identical. So I think it is, if you want to talk about

context for this case, it is relevant. Well, it can also be relevant to why Floyd also feared police officers and didn't want to go away with them. I mean, that can also play into what was going on in his mind. I think Floyd seemed out of his mind, and I don't mean that disrespectfully to Floyd. I mean, he was ranting in a way that he was high. He was very high

on drugs, obviously. Listen, I've had, since we're just wrapping it up, I had one experience, I had two experiences with cops who wrongly accused me of something. But one time I had a cop who was very rough with me. And you know, I'm a nerdy little Jewish guy and I was walking down the street.

And next thing I know, I found myself up against the wall and I said, officer, I'm the owner of this restaurant here. And he says, shut up. And he was like the Terminator. He was strong and he had me. So, and if I had been black, there would be no way on God's earth that you would ever be able

to convince me that wasn't the reason he did that. All of which is to say that shit happens, and it's very difficult to say because it happened here, it happened there, because your grandfather smoked till 99 doesn't mean that you won't die of cancer at 40. And, you know, there's all sorts of stuff.

The cops are rightfully skittish and scared for their lives. And this was during a time of COVID. And they train them in a certain way but when you're dealing with somebody who seems out of his mind you can overreact but so you know I mean I'd be

I think they should show that video and use it to train the cops next time this is do it this way and this is where you went wrong that's obviously like a football team does afterwards. But the flip side is also true that Liz is alluding to that. They could have just kept them in the back of that police car, you know,

and said, go to hell with your claustrophobia. We're taking you in. And, and, and they brought him out and allowed him to lie down. It seems to me as an accommodation to him, right?

They, they were, there was, you know, there was no, they weren't being cruel to him, right? They, they were, there, there was, you know, there was no, they weren't being cruel to him by letting him out of the car. He, he demand, he said, I can't breathe in here. I'm claustrophobic. I said, okay, get out. We'll call you an ambulance. So, you know, none of this really is, is that important to the,

to the overall narrative as far as I can see. Were there any more calls to the ambulance between the first one and then them coming because i mean that i mean that delay is ridiculous did anybody ever call again and there were two calls in total by the four uh responding officers two tau called uh again in the the video yeah it normally is about a minute or two as far as a response time and it took um took about 10 minutes in total for the nine and a half minutes for the ambulance to get there. And then 20 minutes for the fire rig, uh, because they were dispatched to the wrong, uh, location. All right. We have to wrap it up. You have any last questions, Lawrence? Um, I did, but I've been, I've been under the weather for the last few days. Yeah, COVID. My first day on captivity. Well, I want to say, I want to wrap up by where I started,

which is that if as a society we're getting back to the point where we can talk about things like this, I think that's a very, very good thing. I don't claim to know what the essence of truth is in the George Floyd case, but I do think it's very clear that there are problems and issues within that whole story,back in other trials if not for the fact that there's the outcome of this is so important to people's emotions and to people's agendas but of course wisdom has to teach people that when you feel that emotionally involved in something that is the time to breathe and trust your your instincts the least and that is the time when you want to lean most of all on procedure and debate and allowing people to because that's when

that's when mistakes happen i mean how many black people have been languishing in prison because the jurors were primed and ready to believe they did it. And this is the mirror image of that. So having said all this, if anybody watches this, lawyers or otherwise, and watches the documentary and wants to take it on

and does some research and find that there's things we're not pointing out or counter arguments i'll be happy to do another show on it i'll be happy to invite liz on again or lawrence or anybody they want to uh represent the other side i don't want this this doesn't have to be the final word on this issue in terms of my contribution to the debate, because I think it's just it's a fascinating debate. And I think it's very, very important. So that's all I want to say about it. Any final words? Well, I'll say we're not, you know, obviously we're questioning the procedure of the trial. We're not saying yay or nay on Chauvin,

whether he's been convicted of a lesser or all the counts. We just want, we're looking at the procedure. And the way that our criminal legal system is set up just doesn't seem, based on what I've seen from Wood's work, that Chauvin got what you'd want most people to have, just a fair trial. And at the end of the day, that's what you want, because when you get a fair trial, there's no questions,

it's a shot, it's over, and we wouldn't be harassing these questions. That's all you ask for out of the case, and the way things are supposed to work. Liz, you want to say any final word about it? Yeah, I think as Lawrence is saying, it's kind of what Alex King himself

is echoing from behind bars in his talks with me, and we use some of that in the documentary. Is this what we want our justice system to look like? And that's perhaps the question we all need to grapple with as citizens of this country. Are we okay with the mob ruling our justice system in a way? And think about that. So, no, I really appreciate the opportunity you having me on

and having the conversation. And I hope as many people as possible will continue to watch The Fall of Minneapolis. Show it to people because I think you're right. We need to have these conversations. I think far too many of us have been silent for too long. Yeah, everybody should watch it. The more you have a reaction like you don't want to watch

it the more you should be the one who watches it you need to you need to grapple with it the truth is all that matters go ahead lauren can i say one more thing then let me just say this trial happened in front of millions of people watching everything right and we are sitting here questioning how unfair it appears things were now I didn't watch the trial but I know obviously a lot about it I watch the documentary imagine how many people have been wrongly convicted throughout the years

even recently where nobody's watching and they're languishing in prison so this should be eye opening for everybody and I represent a lot of police officers and I always like when police come to me and i'm like they never thought they'd have to use a criminal defense lawyer before that's the up thing it's not perfect is it someone else is accusing you now so this could happen to anybody

and it happens every day our system's not perfect you know it's obviously the best there is but no one's come up with better solutions this happens happens all the time behind when the cameras aren't there. Years ago, the ACLU would have been noisy about this trial. The ACLU basically doesn't exist for that anymore. All right. Thank you very, very much. Liz, if you're ever in New York, I'd be very happy to meet you in person at the Comedy Cellar.

And I really want to thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Don't disconnect. Don't disconnect because you probably have a little thing that says 99% uploading. Don't disconnect until it says 100%. And I'm going to stop the recording.