In editing Dr. John Dunn’s report on the death of George Floyd, I became aware of the 30,000 words journalist Radley Balko has invested in attacking Derek Chauvin’s defenders. Balko spent nine years at the Washington Post. He has some clout. He has been using that clout — and his extensive knowledge of the case — to intimidate those who have just begun to open their eyes to the injustice visited on former Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officers Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, Alex Keung, and Tuo Thau. This bullying needs to stop.

In the way of background, I have been tracking this case since the moment the Floyd death videos started circulating. What piqued my interest was this: I watched a police officer apply the same restraint just weeks before the Floyd incident. During that ghostly Covid spring of 2020 I was at my office in Kansas City’s counter-cultural district when I heard someone howling. People howl a lot here. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: The Un-American Inequality of Jan. 6 ‘Justice’)

When I went down to the street to investigate, I saw a male officer kneeling on the neck of a large, squirming woman. My first thought? “Thank God, she’s white.” This restraint looks awful, but it works. Not wanting to be ghoulish, I chose not to record the incident. In retrospect, I should have. After about ten or so minutes, back up arrived. The officers slipped a Hannibal-the-Cannibal mask over the woman’s head and took her away, still squalling and squirming.

As long as the only people defending the MPD officers were “far-right bomb throwers and conspiracy theorists” — Balko puts Tucker Carlson in this category — Balko was not alarmed. What triggered him was an article by Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Worse, Hughes’s article appeared in the very respectable “Free Press,” hosted by New York Times apostate Bari Weiss.

Although Liz Collin’s film The Fall of Minneapolis had a much broader reach, Balko does not see Collin as a peer. Throughout his three (and counting) articles on the “retconning of George Floyd” — whatever that means — he dismisses Collin and her collaborator J.C. Chaix contemptuously. As to their motive, sneers Balko, “They want to make it easier for police to kill people without consequence.”

The “first claim” Balko sets out to demolish was one offered by both Collin and Hughes, namely that when Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s back and neck for nine minutes, “it could not have been criminal assault because the Minneapolis Police Department has trained its officers —  including Chauvin — to use that very technique.” Says Balko of this claim, “It’s all nonsense.”

Balko makes the case that Chauvin misapplied the maximum restraint technique, or MRT. As explained in the MPD training manual the technique is recommended as a prelude to putting the perp in the “hobble” position. Once hobbled, the perp is to be rolled on to his side. Balko admits that the wording in the MPD manual “does leave just a smidge of ambiguity” about whether the perp should be rolled on to his side if not put in the hobble position. Assuming Balko is correct, his pharisaical parsing of the MPD manual ignores the larger injustice. Four MPD officers are in prison as a result of what would seem to be MPD’s ineffective training.

At trial, the MPD Police Chief Medaria Arradondo and the MPD Inspector Katie Blackwell were both shown a still from the bystander’s perspective of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd. When asked whether that position was “a trained technique” used by the MPD, both answered firmly in the negative. Added Blackwell in disgust, “I don’t know what kind of improvised position that is.”

Balko knows these officials were shading the truth. He admits, “[t]he entire reason the MPD taught the MRT — the only reason it was included in the MPD manual — was to incapacitate a suspect, but only long enough for police to administer a hobble.” Had the jurors been able to see an image from a 2018 training slide or one in the 2014 MPD manual, they would have understood the deception. Those images replicate the restraint that Chauvin used. Judge Peter Cahill disallowed jurors from seeing these images under the dubious pretext that there was no proof Chauvin was trained in this technique.

Less than a week out the Police Academy, rookie officer Thomas Lane was likely better trained than his senior officer. Twice Lane suggested to Chauvin that Floyd be rolled on his side. Balko acknowledges as much but makes no objection to Lane’s 30-month sentence for “depriving George Floyd Jr., of his constitutional rights.” What would prosecutors have had Lane do? Wrestle Chauvin away from Floyd for his failure to see through the ambiguities of the MPD manual?

Balko argues with some justification that Collin conflates the transitional MRT Chauvin used with the more comprehensive hobble technique. But to suggest that this phase of the MRT was some kind of rogue improvisation is simply wrong. Chauvin may well have avoided the extra step of the hobble because he expected the EMTs to be on scene momentarily. He did not know that they had gone to the wrong address. Had the EMTs arrived on time, Floyd would still be dead, but the officers would not be in prison. Balko knows this. He just doesn’t care to mention it. His dissection of the MRT argument, however disingenuous, represents Balko’s strongest moment. (READ MORE: Racism, Revenge and Ruin: The Hellish Forces of Barack Obama)

The “second claim” Balko presumes to swat down is that “Floyd’s official autopsy found that he died of a heart attack brought on by cardiovascular disease and drug use. Therefore, Chauvin could not have been responsible for Floyd’s death.” As Dr. Dunn makes clear in the accompanying article, Floyd did die of a heart attack. Given the seriousness of his heart condition, Floyd could have fallen over dead shoveling snow. The meth may have been an aggravating factor. The fentanyl was not. For the last two years Dr. Dunn has been trying to dissuade his allies from blaming Floyd’s death on fentanyl.

Balko cites with approval the claim of the pulmonologist who testified for the state that “even a perfectly healthy person would likely have died” under the conditions Floyd faced. As Dr. Dunn proved through demonstration, this is hogwash. “I did the 220 pound guy on top of me, at 165 pounds, previous broken neck in 2020, 77 years old, just to emphasize that there is no way the prone restraint is harmful, even with a really big man’s left leg on my neck,” Dr. Dunn reports.

“If you look at the demo I made,” Dunn continues, “the guy put his leg on my neck. I did the arrangement to make sure the guy’s knee was on my neck and he had his weight forward. I ordered him to make sure he was putting his weight on my neck — didn’t know at the time that Balko would try to rehab the prosecution/trial misconduct with his mumbo jumbo about the misapplication of the restraint.”

Balko calls his opponents “wildly dishonest” for omitting certain information, most of which was irrelevant. Balko shocked me, however, by omitting what is arguably the single most critical feature of the entire trial, namely the corrupting influence of Dr. Roger Mitchell. Dr. Dunn mentions this, but I will elaborate.

Hennepin County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker initially reported that there were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation in Floyd’s death. He added “neck compression” only in his final report. About this there is no dispute. Balko shows no curiosity as to why Baker made this change. Had he sought the truth, he would have had to ditch this entire voluminous exercise in ill-spirited pettifoggery.

In May 2021, the attorneys for Tuo Thao filed a motion that should have been headline news. His attorneys asked the court “for a factual finding that the testimony of Dr. Baker was directly and indirectly coerced by the State and its agents.” As the motion notes, Dr. Roger Mitchell, then medical examiner of Washington, D.C., managed to read Baker’s preliminary finding that “revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.”

An exhibit released later by Judge Cahill suggested the reason for those changes. The exhibit discussed a November 2020 meeting held by state prosecutors with Mitchell. The state’s summary of its conference with Mitchell reads as follows, “When the preliminary result came out via the criminal complaint, Mitchell found the statement was bizarre…. Mitchell was reading and said this is not right. So Mitchell called Baker and said first of all Baker should fire his public information officer.” This call appears to have taken place on Friday, May 29, the day Baker’s preliminary findings were made public.

The summary continues, “Baker said that he didn’t think the neck compression played a part and that he didn’t find petechiae. Mitchell said but you know you can not have petechiae and still have asphyxia and can still have neck compression.” Wanting to get out from under the mounting pressure, Baker asked Mitchell if he were going to come to Minneapolis and do a second exam. Said Mitchell, “I am just calling to lend you support and if you need support, let me know.”

That “support” took a diabolical turn. The summary continues, “Mitchell thought about it more that weekend, and was going to release an op-ed…. Mitchell called Baker first to let him know that he was going to be critical of Baker’s findings.” The politically wired Mitchell — he was also deputy mayor of Washington — was planning to send the op-ed to the Washington Post, a move that would wreck Baker’s career and possibly endanger his life. (READ MORE: The Semantic Burden of Speaking While White)

That was Mitchell’s most flagrant abuse of power, but not his only one. In daring to testify on Chauvin’s behalf, the intrepid Dr. David Fowler provoked Mitchell’s wrath. While the trial was still in progress, Mitchell enlisted four hundred physicians to sign an open letter to Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh. The signers demanded an “immediate investigation” into Fowler’s practices during the seventeen years he spent as the State of Maryland’s chief medical examiner.

Weeks later, feeling the heat, Frosh launched a detailed review of more than one hundred autopsies during Fowler’s tenure. Writes the willfully blind Balko, “Fowler’s testimony at Floyd’s trial was so dubious that Maryland’s attorney general ordered an audit of the autopsies Fowler had done on people who died in police custody.” No mention of Mitchell.

As the state summary notes, “In this conversation, Mitchell said, you don’t want to be the medical examiner who tells everyone they didn’t see what they saw. You don’t want to be the smartest person in the room and be wrong.” Mitchell gave Baker an ultimatum. “Mitchell said neck compression has to be in the diagnosis.” The state summary ends matter-of-factly, “[Mitchell] talked to Dr. Baker before his diagnosis were final.” The motion by Tao adds this damning note, “The final autopsy findings included neck compression. Id. This was contrary to Dr. Baker’s conclusion before speaking with Dr. Mitchell twice.” None of this information found its way into the trial.

The trial environment was impossibly fraught. Judge Cahill denied Chauvin a change of venue and refused to sequester the jury even after a nearby police shooting further heightened the tension. Every day, jurors entered a courthouse surrounded by barricades and barbed wire and patrolled by National Guard. After a use-of-force expert testified on Chauvin’s behalf, justice lovers left a pig’s head on what they thought was his doorstep. The jurors had every reason to fear a non-guilty verdict, Cahill and Baker even more so. Minneapolis had already been burned down once. Balko mentions none of this.

Balko insists that medical examiners “need to be shielded from factors that could unduly influence their conclusions.” That much is agreed. He preserves the high ground, however, by ignoring the threat level Baker faced and failing to mention Mitchell at all. That failure is pure media malpractice. To accuse others of “knowingly spreading false information” and then burying crucial evidence makes him not the crusader for justice he pretends to be, but the perfect propagandist for the state.

Jack Cashill’s most recent book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethic Flight from America’s Cities, is available in all formats.