Jury selection has been underway in Chauvin's criminal trial for a week, and half the panel had been seated by Friday evening, when news came down that Minneapolis had agreed to pay the Floyd family $27 million to end civil claims accusing the city of unconstitutional policing practices that ultimately led to Floyd's killing.
That deal in a separate federal suit had an "incredible propensity to taint the jury pool" in the state's murder trial, Chauvin's attorney, Eric Nelson of Halberg Criminal Defense, said during a hearing Monday morning, before jury selection resumed in the criminal case. Nelson called the timing of the settlement announcement "suspicious."
"The fact this came in the exact middle of jury selection — it's perplexing to me, Your Honor," Nelson told Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill. "Whose idea it was to release this information when we have jurors in the courtroom, we have jurors seated in this case, and we have seven more jurors to potentially find."
Nelson asked on Monday that the court reconsider old requests to delay the trial and change its venue. He also requested additional peremptory strikes, in addition to the eight he has left. And he suggested sequestering the jury sooner — the plan now is to put the panel up in a hotel only during deliberations — and to call back the seven jurors who had already been seated, to see if they'd been exposed to news about the civil settlement.
Judge Cahill said he would call back the seven seated jurors for more questioning but said he wouldn't add more peremptory strikes, since being prejudiced by the news would call for a for-cause strike by the court. He said he would consider a trial delay.
It was already going to be difficult to find jurors who were unfamiliar with the charges against Chauvin. The image of a Black man gasping for breath under the knee of a white officer rekindled a nationwide racial justice movement last summer; a cellphone video showed Chauvin pinning Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes, as his victim — who was suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill — begged him to stop, said he couldn't breathe, and lost consciousness. The video went viral and was viewed by millions.
But Nelson's concerns about the civil settlement further tainting the jury pool were illustrated by the very first potential juror called in Monday morning. She told the judge she'd learned about the civil settlement despite her efforts to follow her summons' instructions and avoid the news.
The potential juror, a human resources expert, said she was familiar with the idea that it's sometimes easier to reach a settlement to make an allegation "go away" than to litigate. But the scale of the deal the city struck with Floyd's family was hard to ignore.
"When I heard that, I almost gasped at the amount," she said. "My guess is with that large of a settlement, the city felt it would not prevail in civil court."
She said she did not feel she could be impartial, adding she'd had opinions about the case even before the deal was announced.
The $27 million deal ended a Minnesota federal lawsuit accusing the city of unconstitutional policing practices that ultimately led to Floyd's death.
The civil suit alleged the Minneapolis Police Department trains its officers to use deadly force, including neck restraints, in nondeadly circumstances, even though the use of such force in circumstances that do not pose an immediate threat of serious bodily injury or death is prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.
The Floyd family's suit also alleged that Minneapolis frequently fails to fire or discipline officers who show patterns of misconduct, and that the police department has a history of overlooking racially biased policing.
According to the complaint, Chauvin was the subject of 17 citizen complaints from 2006 to 2015, only one of which resulted in discipline, in the form of a letter of reprimand. He also shot and killed at least three people and engaged in a reckless police chase in 2005 resulting in three deaths, the complaint said.
Details of the settlement have not been made public. At a news conference Friday, Floyd's family members and their legal team lauded the city for coming to the agreement, with both sides noting that an additional $500,000 will be set aside to support businesses in the neighborhood where Floyd was killed last year.
One of the Floyd family's attorneys, Ben Crump, called it the largest pretrial settlement in a police violence case in U.S. history.
Nelson blamed the publicity the settlement drew on a variety of public figures. He criticized Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for referring to the City Council's "unanimous decision," suggesting that word choice was evocative of a jury. He noted one of the city councilors was the son of state Attorney General Keith Ellison, who was in the courtroom and whose office is leading the prosecution of Chauvin's case.
But prosecutors said they were also concerned about the settlement. "It would be our strong preference that we be trying this case in a vacuum with no pretrial publicity," said Steven Schleicher of Maslon LLP, who is working pro bono for the state. "It would make this a lot less complicated."
Schleicher said the civil settlement was completely out of the prosecution's control, that they hadn't been consulted about it.
He added, "I don't even know which way that cuts, if it's for us or against us."
"The problem is it cuts," Judge Cahill said. "That's the concern."
--Additional reporting by Dave Simpson. Editing by Brian Baresch.
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