Assisting me on my research into the events surrounding George Floyd’s death these past few years has been Dr. John Dunn. A physician and an attorney, Dunn is board certified in legal medicine and is a frequent author/lecturer on medical and legal matters.
There is ample documentation to prove Cahill does not deserve trust.
As he and I have documented, the murder trial of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin in spring 2021 served up justice in name only. Presiding over that trial was Judge Peter Cahill. A week ago the Minnesota Star Tribune published an account of the now retired Cahill’s first interview about the trial. To say the least, we were not reassured.
The reporters, Liz Sawyer and Andy Mannix, asked Cahill why he denied the defense request for a change of venue from the fear-ridden, burnt over city of Minneapolis. Said Cahill, “What, are we going to change the venue to Mars?”
Dunn wasn’t buying. The Sixth Amendment, he argued, established “the right to an impartial jury.” Cahill had a much better chance of finding such a jury in any Minnesota county other than Hennepin. If he could not find an impartial jury anywhere, it would have been more just to declare a mistrial.
As to why he chose to live stream the trial, an unprecedented step in Minnesota jurisprudence, Cahill told the reporters. “I thought, no one will trust the result — from either end — if they don’t see what’s going on. All of us hate the spotlight, and we’d rather just do our jobs, but I certainly don’t regret it.”
Dr. Dunn wasn’t buying this either, “No, it was just Cahill’s attempt to be another Lance Ito.” Lance Ito, the Los Angeles judge who famously mismanaged the O.J. Simpson murder trial, made the connection. He sent Cahill a card wishing him “peace and wisdom.” Cahill secured the peace at the expense of wisdom.
As Cahill knew, live streaming would have been dangerous for himself and disastrous for the City of Minneapolis — if Chauvin had been acquitted. That risk had to factor into his decision to go live, but, as Cahill all but admitted, that risk was slim. He admittedly prejudged the case from day one, telling the reporters that his first thought upon seeing the viral video of the arrest, was, “He’s gonna get charged.”
And once charged, Chauvin could not be acquitted. To assure Chauvin was convicted, Cahill disallowed the jury from seeing relevant MPD training guides that would have vindicated Chauvin and his three colleagues. He also refused to challenge either Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo or Assistant Chief Katie Blackwell when each testified falsely at trial that the MPD does not teach a restraint technique that the training guides clearly showed being taught. Cahill knew the truth. He had seen the training materials.
These “evidentiary rulings,” Dunn insists, “violated the civil rights of Chauvin and the other officers.” This is not a speculation on Dunn’s part. In dismissing a defamation suit brought by Blackwell against Liz Collin and Alpha News, Hennepin County Judge Edward Wahl admitted that the “MPD [Minneapolis Police Department] training materials from 2018-2019 … included images of officers applying knees to the neck or upper back.”
During his long career as an attorney, Cahill had worked cases for both the prosecution and defense. He had to know that the technique Chauvin used to restrain a muscular, doped-up felon a half-foot taller and sixty pounds heavier was routine. But he also knew the racial dynamics of Minneapolis. When Cahill said, “he’s gonna get charged,” he knew why: Chauvin was white and Floyd black.
As Chauvin’s partner, the still imprisoned Tuo Thao, told Liz Collin of Alpha News, “I’ll put it this way, if it were my knees on the back of Floyd’s neck or black officer Keung’s knees, or Black Chief’s Arradondo’s knees, but for Derek being born white, we’d all still be patrolling the city of Minneapolis.”
As the reporters noted, Chief Judge Toddrick Barnette chose Cahill to preside at the Chauvin trial. What the reporters did not say is that Barnette was the first person of color elected Chief Judge. “It just baffles the mind,” Barnette said in a 2023 interview. “In 2020, in one of the most diverse counties in Minnesota, when there were so many other judges before me deserving of the role. How can it be?”
It could “be” because when Barnette was born Hennepin County was 3 percent black. By 2020, despite a huge influx of Somalians, Hennepin County was still only 13 percent black. Barnette overlooked demographics here to find racism. In the introduction to this interview, not surprisingly, the reader learned that Barnette “prioritizes diversity and inclusion within the justice system.” Chauvin would have been better served had “justice” been Barnette’s top priority.
Barnette was obviously confident Cahill had the same priorities as he did.
He reportedly “hand-picked” Cahill because he “knew that [Cahill] wouldn’t fold under media pressure or community pressure.” Except that Cahill did fold. As Cahill admitted, “Most of the hate mail was, ‘You should have given him life.’ You had pastors condemning me to hell for my ‘light sentence.’” That “light sentence” was 22-1/2 years. Cahill could well imagine the haters’ reaction had Chauvin been acquitted.
So could Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison. A black activist whose bid to head the DNC was undone by his close ties to the Nation of Islam, Ellison took the case away from the Hennepin County prosecutors when they balked at trying Chauvin’s three fellow officers — Tuo Thao, Alex Kueng, and Thomas Lane. To heighten the fury around Floyd’s death, Ellison refused to share the officers’ exculpatory body cam footage until forced to do so by judge’s order.
That judge was Cahill, but Cahill deserves no credit here. He waited ten weeks after Floyd’s death before ordering the release of the footage and only then after the British Daily Mail published a leaked version.
Cahill had resisted the release for fear “that making the videos public could taint the jury pool for the cases.” No, the viral video and ensuing riots tainted the jury pool beyond redemption. The body cam footage would have undone some of the damage. No fan of full disclosure, Cahill had also imposed a gag order on the defense attorneys before yielding to media pressure to undo it. He “regretted” the gag order only because it proved ineffective.
To be fair, Cahill may not have known at the time of Chauvin’s trial Ellison’s most corrupt act. On November 5, 2020 — five months before Chauvin’s trial — D.C. Medical Examiner Roger Mitchell boasted to four state attorneys how he threatened Hennepin County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker into adding “neck compression” to the final charging document. That addition made Chauvin vulnerable to a murder charge. Dunn, who has reviewed the otherwise competent autopsy report in depth, was shocked by this gratuitous change.
The memorandum documenting the November 2020 meeting between the state attorneys and Mitchell only came to light in a May 2021 motion filed by Officer Tuo Thao’s attorneys Robert and Natalie Paule. “The State did nothing in response to this coercion,” wrote the Paules. “Instead, the State knowingly allowed Dr. Baker to take the stand in State v. Chauvin and testified to coerced statements.”
If Cahill did not know about the threats by Mitchell and the subsequent evidence suppression by the State at the time of the trial, he did know when he sentenced Chauvin in June 2021. He just chose not to acknowledge anything amiss. He also ignored what he knew to be false testimony by MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo and Assistant Chief Katie Blackwell.
Wrote Cahill in his sentencing order, “Mr. Chauvin’s continuing insistence that he believed ‘he was simply performing his lawful duty in assisting other officers in the arrest of George Floyd’ and was acting “in good faith reliance [on] his own experience as a police officer and the training he had received’ … was rejected by every supervisory and training officer of the Minneapolis Police Department who testified at trial as well as by the jury.” In the response to Blackwell’s defamation suit against Liz Collin, 33 MPD officers testified they had been trained in that same technique.
For a defendant like Chauvin with zero criminal history points, Cahill wrote that the presumptive sentence was 150 months or 12-1/2 years. The State asked for an upward adjustment to 30 years due to aggravating factors, one of which was “the presence of children at the scene.” The Solomonic Cahill settled on a happy medium of 270 months or 22-1/2 years.
To their credit, the interviewers noted the growing criticism of the trial and even cited Liz Collin’s powerful film, “The Fall of Minneapolis.” Cahill claimed to have paid his critics no mind. “The far right, you know, their daily bread is revisionist history,” he pontificated. “But in this particular instance, it’s a lack of trust in the judicial system as a whole, and the jury system, and that’s concerning.”
There is ample documentation to prove Cahill does not deserve trust. The interview only confirms that Chauvin trial was a throwback to the days when race trumped justice. As esteemed jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded us a century ago, “Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury.” And mob law was what dictated justice in Minneapolis.
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