Attorneys have sparred for months over whether the charge should apply to Chauvin, the white police officer caught on video pressing his knee into Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes last year while Floyd asked him to stop and said he couldn't breathe. The killing of Floyd, who was Black, sparked nationwide racial justice protests over the summer.
After a 30-minute hearing Thursday, Judge Peter Cahill ruled from the bench that third-degree murder would be added to the second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter charges also available to the jury in Chauvin's trial.
His ruling came after a state appeals court instructed him to reconsider the charge in light of its decision in another murder case against a police officer. Judge Cahill said the appeals court had made it clear that he was bound by its precedential decision in that other case, after he initially found last month that the decision wasn't binding.
"I accept that," he said. "I even agree … that opinions have precedential value immediately."
The third-degree murder charge was in the original complaint filed against Chauvin days after Floyd's killing in May, but Judge Cahill dismissed it in October, finding Chauvin's actions didn't meet the relevant state law's requirement that a defendant endangered people besides the victim.
Prosecutors then sought to reinstate the charge last month, citing a change in precedent by the appeals court in the case of officer Mohamed Noor, who was convicted in the fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk. Noor had argued his case didn't meet the endangerment requirement, but the appeals court ruled in February that the charge "may be sustained even if the death-causing act was directed at a single person."
Judge Cahill ruled in February that the Noor case wasn't binding because it was being appealed again, to Minnesota's Supreme Court. But prosecutors in the Chauvin case won a reversal Friday, when the intermediate appeals court ruled that its Noor decision had "binding authority upon its filing."
Judge Cahill decided to wait to hear arguments on reinstating the charge Friday, finding he didn't yet have jurisdiction because Chauvin had appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court. The high court declined to hear the appeal Wednesday evening, and the lower appeals court then officially entered judgment.
Finally able to comment on the appellate ruling during Thursday morning's hearing, Judge Cahill seemed slightly defensive, noting that the appeals court had said that "the plain language of the relevant rules" meant that its precedential opinion in Noor had "immediate authoritative effect."
The judge balked at that description, saying it implied that he'd ignored the rules' plain language or, "at worst, was too lazy to look up the rules."
"Neither is the case," Judge Cahill said. "Upon reading the Noor opinion, this court immediately turned to the rules and looked for plain language. We found silence, not plain language. I think the court of appeals reaches too far by saying there is 'plain language' in the rules."
Whether it was in the rules or not, the appeals court made clear Friday that its Noor ruling was binding. While Judge Cahill insisted he couldn't have known that beforehand, he said he would now comply with that finding.
"It is my belief and analysis that courts have inherent judicial authority to say when their opinions take effect," he said.
During the hearing, defense attorney Eric Nelson argued that even applying the new Noor standard, the judge need not revive the third-degree murder charge against his client.
The cases were procedurally different, Nelson said. In Noor, the defendant had challenged the third-degree murder charge post-conviction, while the dispute over Chauvin's charge has taken place before the trial.
The facts in Noor were also different, Nelson said. Officer Noor drew his gun and shot across his partner's chest out of the opposite window of their squad car, he noted, and "anyone within the line of travel of the bullet was at risk."
The use of a weapon, or "instrument," was important, Nelson said, because it played into the state law's requirement of dangerousness.
"In Noor, there was a gun, it's inherently dangerous," he said. "Factually, there is no instrumentality other than arguably Mr. Chauvin's knee, which is not inherently dangerous."
The state was represented in its appeal by former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal, now a partner at Hogan Lovells.
Arguing on Thursday via Zoom, Katyal said he would give Nelson's arguments about the differences between the Noor and Chauvin cases "major points for creativity," but that the decision in Noor didn't go into the facts of that case and focused instead on the law.
Judge Cahill came to the same conclusion. He noted the appeals court probably could have looked at the facts of the Noor case and found it didn't need to reach the "single person rule." But it did.
"I agree they are different cases," he said, "but it seems if anything, this is more the single-person rule application, even more than Noor."
Nelson also raised ex post facto, a doctrine that a new criminal statute cannot be applied retroactively to a crime.
"We've got 50 years of precedent … that says this single-person [rule] would be a defense," he said. "And it was a defense. It was such a defense, that this court dismissed it for probable cause. Noor comes along and says, 'Hey, we're changing this rule.'"
Katyal said that ex post facto could only be violated by a legislature that enacts a new law and tries to apply it retroactively. He added that this wasn't a new interpretation of the law, either, because evidence of the one-person rule could be found in case law as early as 1896. Even if the case law was "murky," Katyal said, that wasn't an ex post facto violation.
"The idea that officer Chauvin would have been surprised by it, or was acting in reliance on existing law, would be pretty ludicrous," he said.
The judge agreed, noting that the statute itself was "the same today as it was in May 2020," when Floyd was killed.
--Editing by Aaron Pelc.
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