Maybe they're like you. Have "ardent" and "staunch" conservative views on certain things but lazily self-identify as "centrist" and "Independent". I would bet most Liberal and Conservatives -- even hardcore Conservatives like yourself -- would self-identify as "objective" and "fairminded". I suspect most racists (like Donald Trump) think they don't "have a racist bone in their body".
They probably argue that because it's stupid.
Most Republican have private-health and want to be see a hybrid healthcare system, in which the both public and private models coexist. I'm sure there are many Conservative service-people, and Federal officials and politicians who enjoy their Government healthcare plan. Even Donald Trump said he didn't want Americans dying on the street because they couldn't afford healthcare.
Robert Shapiro.
OK. Far-Right Conservatives who self-identify as "centrists" and "Independents" responded to Trump's dog-whistles and voted for a racist who promoted "Big Tent" conspiracy theories.
More dishonest, shifting, squirming drivel, the kind you usually put out. I don't think I've ever seen you admit a single error, no matter how plainly it's been documented for you.
You're claiming the "liberal" news press (which I figure you think make up most of the media in the US) has never reported that Floyd had used counterfeit currency?
I understand one employee made two trips to the car but with different people each time. He said they wanted Floyd to return to the store to talk to the manager.
All the more reason not to pin Floyd to the ground and force all of one's body weight onto his neck. Floyd claimed he was claustrophobic about being put in the back seat which was partitioned from the front. And that it would make his breathing difficult.
LOL!. How often do you see suspect being driven to jail with the back window down? Imagine a racist like Derek Chauvin sitting beside Floyd with the back window open. Chauvin would have put Floyd in the back seat with the windows closed just to watch him suffer. Why not call for a larger vehicle or one with air conditioning in the back.
Where was "Chivalrous Chauvin's" offer to ease his weight off Floyd's respiratory system when Floyd said he couldn't breathe and was calling "mama"? When the trained-EMT bystander said Floyd was dying.
You're claiming the "liberal" media never reported that Floyd resisted being put into the police car? I'm pretty sure every news media showed video of it.
From Chauvin's body camera. This is Floyd "kicking" officers and knocking Chauvin's camera off?
The report couldn't speak to when drugs were taken; their presence can take days to leave the system. Floyd had norfentanyl in his blood, meaning the fentanyl had begun to break down.
The medical examiner said the greater factor in Floyd's death was "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual restraint, and neck compression." This finding was supported by an independent examination: "asphyxiation from sustained pressure was the cause."
Floyd didn't have a lethal dosage of fentanyl. Dr. Daniel Isenschmid, a forensic toxicologist at NMS Labs in Pennsylvania, testified at Racist-Cop Chauvin's trial the amount of fentanyl found in Floyd's system was lower than a quarter of those in a DUI study (samples were taken from live people).
"Toxicologist Testifies on Drug Levels in George Floyd’s System Compared to DUI cases" (ABC News Link )
Cardiologist Jonathan Rich testified: "I can state with a high degree of medical certainty that George Floyd did not die from a primary cardiac event, and he did not die from a drug overdose."
Dr. Martin Tobin, a pulmonologist and critical care specialist of Loyola University Medical Center testified at Racist-Cop Chauvin's trial: "A healthy person subjected to what Mr. Floyd was subjected to would have died."
Yup, as usual, when confronted with facts that refute your position, you went running only to sources that you knew agreed with you and cited/copied-and-pasted from those sources. You might try reading the Chauvin trial transcript.
You also very dishonestly cherry-picked screencaps from the police bodycam footage, or you just copied-pasted those screencaps from another site that cherry-picked them. Anyone who watches the entire bodycam footage will see how dishonest your screencaps are.
Let's get a few facts straight:
* The footage that shows the best view of Derek Chauvin's knee on George Floyd shows that his knee was not on the neck but on the area of the upper back just below the neck. Even the very anti-Chauvin Minneapolis police chief admitted this under cross examination. The medical examiner also acknowledged this.
* The chief medical examiner, after noting that he was aware of cases where people had died from 3 ng/ml of fentanyl, observed that if Floyd had been found dead in an apartment with 11 ng/ml of fentanyl in his blood, his death would have been ruled an overdose. Floyd's toxicology report showed 11 ng/ml of fentanyl in his blood.
* Floyd began complaining about being unable to breathe long before he was pinned on the ground. This was probably because of the large amount of fentanyl he had ingested. A known, documented side effect of the normal dosage of fentanyl is "slowed breathing" and "stopped breathing." Floyd took much more than the normal dosage. Another plausible cause of Floyd's breathing issue was his heart condition and hypertension combined with the excitement of the police encounter. All of these factors may have caused his breathing issue.
Regardless of the reason, Floyd began to claim that he could not breathe several minutes before he was pinned on the ground, so clearly there was something medically wrong with him before Chauvin pinned him on the ground. Yet the prosecution made the ludicrous claim that Floyd's health issues and drug ingestion played no role in his death, and that Floyd died solely and only from the force that Chauvin applied.
* Floyd was only pinned on the ground after he refused to get into the police car and then violently resisted arrest. Floyd’s resistance included kicking one of the officers hard enough to nearly knock him over. If Floyd had gotten into the police car and not resisted arrest, he never would have been pinned on the ground in the first place.
* For that matter, Floyd had two chances to avoid even having the police called to the scene: after Floyd stole the cigarettes from a Cup Foods store by using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy them, two Cup Foods employees confronted him about the stolen cigarettes and twice asked him to either return them or pay for them. Both times he refused, and when he refused the second time, one of the employees called for the police.
* The prosecution made the ludicrous claim that Floyd died of asphyxiation and that Floyd's serious heart condition, his hypertension, and his ingestion of fentanyl and meth had absolutely nothing to do with his death. However, there was no evidence of asphyxiation. The medical examiner made this clear. Specifically:
There was no evidence of petechial hemorrhaging. There was no bruising to the neck or back above the skin, no bruising under the skin, and no bruising of the subcutaneous muscles of the neck and back. The medical examiner said he would expect to see those things if Floyd had died of asphyxiation.
In addition, there was no finding that pressure was applied to the point of the neck that would have caused these injuries. There were no injuries to the structures of the neck. The medical examiner also noted that when he finally did review the video footage of the incident, it did not appear to him that the placement of the knee affected the structures of the neck because Mr. Floyd could lift up his head, turn his head, move it around. Furthermore, he saw no fractures to the structures of the neck, including the hyoid bone. There were no soft tissue injuries to the sides of Floyd’s neck either.
Let's get some other facts straight:
* The prosecution, in a rather amazing display of deception, argued that the 11 ng/ml of fentanyl in Floyd's blood was unimportant and had no bearing on Floyd's death. They did this via a toxicologist who cited post-mortem and DUI cases where people had about the same amount or a greater amount of fentanyl in their blood. As the cross examination made clear, this was a meaningless, and misleading, presentation because there was no information on the cause of death for any of the post-mortem cases, and because there was no information on the health of the people in the DUI cases.
The prosecution simply ignored the well-documented fact that the lethal dosage of fentanyl for some people can be as low as 1 ng/ml, and that, as the medical examiner himself correctly noted, the standard range of fentanyl's lethal dosage starts at 3 ng/ml. Floyd had nearly four times more fentanyl than that in his blood--again, 11 ng/ml.
Here are some sources that document the fact that people have died from 3 ng/ml of fentanyl:
http://medicalexaminer.cuyahogacounty.us/pdf_medicalexaminer/en-US/SOFT2016Fentanyl.pdfhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6609322/https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6604a4.htmhttp://www.ochsnerjournal.org/content/ochjnl/19/4/314.full.pdfHere is what the NIH says about fentanyl:
Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid that is similar to morphine but is 50 to 100 times more potent. . . .
Fentanyl's effects include . . . problems breathing. . . .
When people overdose on fentanyl, their breathing can slow or stop. This can decrease the amount of oxygen that reaches the brain, a condition called hypoxia. Hypoxia can lead to a coma and permanent brain damage, and even death. (https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/fentanyl)
* The prosecution did all they could to ignore the fact that there was a critical 8-minute delay in getting air into Floyd's lungs after the EMS personnel arrived. Even one of the prosecution's medical experts admitted this delay was "
crucial." Chauvin had nothing to do with this delay. The delay occurred because the EMS personnel concluded that the crowd's hostility made the situation unsafe for them to begin reviving Floyd on the scene.
So the blame for this crucial delay can be placed on the people in the crowd who were cursing and yelling at the police. The crowd members who were doing the cursing and yelling knew nothing about what had happened before Floyd was pinned on the ground, and apparently it never occurred to them that the police had had a good reason for pinning Floyd on the ground.
The unruly crowd members who caused the 8-minute delay in getting air into Floyd's lungs had not seen Floyd violently resist being placed into the police car. They had not seen Floyd kick Officer Lane and Officer Chauvin while they were struggling with him (he kicked Chauvin hard enough to knock off his bodycam and his badge; he kicked Lane so hard that he nearly knocked him over). They had not seen Floyd repeatedly deny he was on drugs. They did not know that Floyd began saying he could not breathe long before he was pinned on the ground.
Nor did the cursing and yelling crowd members know that Floyd had had numerous chances to avoid being pinned by simply getting into the police car. They did not know that Floyd had ingested more than three times the lethal dosage of a drug that can slow or stop your breathing. They did not know that Floyd had a serious heart problem--that Floyd had a 90% narrowing of the right coronary artery and a 75% narrowing of the left coronary artery. They did not know that Floyd suffered from hypertension. They did not know that Floyd had just stolen items from the Cup Foods store by using counterfeit money, and that the police had been called because Floyd had twice refused to return or pay for the items when two store employees asked him to do so.
The crowd members who were cursing and yelling at the pollice did not know any of these things. They happened to show up, saw Floyd pinned on the ground, and assumed the worst about the police.
* Not only did the prosecution fail to prove that Chauvin's use of force was excessive, but they offered no evidence that Chauvin had intended his force to be harmful. The defense noted that Chauvin offered to roll down the rear windows if Floyd would just get in the police car, that he offered to sit with Floyd in the car, and that he offered to turn on the air conditioning if Floyd desired. These are hardly the actions of a police officer who was intent on harming the suspect.
* The prosecution emphasized the fact that Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd's back even after Floyd stopped turning and kicking. But according to police training and policy, Chauvin had every right to keep Floyd pinned on the ground even though he had stopped twisting and flexing his legs, given the serious physical confrontation that had just occurred. Defense attorney Eric Nelson addressed this issue well:
Reasonable police officers throughout the course of a control technique will continue to assess the level of resistance. Remember what Lieutenant Johnny Mercil said: “Simply because a person isn’t kicking at you or punching at you or biting at you, it does not mean that you can’t control them physically with your body weight.”
This is the point where Dr. Tobin testified that Mr. Floyd had an anoxic seizure. Right? But we’re not analyzing the use of force from the perspective of a doctor with 46 years of medical experience who had 150 hours of time to watch an event from multiple perspectives over and over and over and over again. It’s a reasonable police officer standard. How would a reasonable police officer interpret this? Does a reasonable police officer even know what an anoxic seizure is? A reasonable police officer will interpret this as at least some form of minimal resistance. Reasonable police officers, again, are continuing to monitor. They’re expecting EMS to arrive.
* The prosecution also placed great emphasis on the fact that while he was pinned on the ground, Floyd complained that he could not breathe but that Chauvin still kept his knee on his back. But, as mentioned, Floyd started saying he could not breathe several minutes before he was pinned on the ground, and he was only pinned on the ground because he violently resisted arrest. Furthermore, the police officers knew that it was not uncommon for suspects to claim they were having a medical emergency to avoid going to jail. Nelson:
A reasonable police officer will take into consideration, again, his training, his experience, right? Lieutenant Mercil talked about, and many people talked about, many of the officers talked about how it is not uncommon for suspects to feign or pretend to have a medical emergency to avoid being arrested. Unfortunately, that is the reality. Nobody likes to get arrested and reasonable police officers know that. How many times does someone, “Oh, my heart hurts,” or I’m having a medical emergency,” insert whatever emergency. Right? Simply because they don’t want to go to jail.
A reasonable police officer will take his training into experience. And you heard Lieutenant Mercil specifically say that when someone says that they can’t breathe, but they are talking, if they’re talking, it means they’re breathing. Right? If they’re talking, it means they’re breathing. Again, compare that to the testimony of Dr. Tobin, who told you that same thing. That is true. If you are talking, you are breathing. It doesn’t mean effectively. Dr. Tobin described how even medical doctors have problems sometimes assessing the legitimacy of a patient’s needs relevant to their respiratory processes because they’re saying, “I can’t breathe,” and some doctors confuse it for just anxiety or this or that. If medical doctors make these mistakes, Dr. Tobin told you it provides a false sense of security. Right? Lieutenant Mercil told you that that is what is said among police officers. He’s the trainer. How many times do we hear an officer say based on his training and experience, if you can talk, you can breathe? I counted seven.
* It is manifestly unfair to judge Chauvin's actions with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. No one knew that Floyd had a serious heart condition. No one knew that Floyd had hypertension. No one knew that Floyd had just ingested nearly four times the fatal dosage of fentanyl. Floyd had been complaining for several minutes that he could not breathe, even before he violently and powerfully resisted being placed in the police car; it took three officers to finally get him in the car. The officers undoubtedly knew that offering such powerful resistance surely required a great deal of breathing. So the officers had every rational reason to doubt Floyd's claim that he could not breathe.
When we consider Chauvin's actions objectively and fairly, we see that he actually did nothing wrong based on what he and the other officers knew at the time. His knee on the back was not excessive force and did not prohibit Floyd from breathing. Floyd stopped breathing because his heart gave out and/or because he had just taken a massive dosage of fentanyl. None of the officers could have had any inkling that Floyd was about to die. Floyd had just powerfully resisted being placed in the police car. They knew the EMS ambulance would arrive in a few minutes, and it arrived just a few minutes after Floyd seemed to stop noticeably resisting. And, if most of the people in the crowd had not been cursing and yelling at the police officers, the EMS personnel would have started treating Floyd when they arrived instead of waiting 8 critical minutes before putting oxygen into his lungs.
No one said the police who assaulted Floyd knew of his criminal record. Porn star? So what? Donald Trump associated with Jeffrey Epstein.
The police did not know about Floyd's criminal record and his revolting porn career. I mentioned it to give some context to the efforts to turn Floyd into a "great hero," "loving father," "devoted family man."
