Derek Chauvin, who received a 21-year federal sentence yesterday for lethally violating George Floyd's constitutional rights, still seems to think he did nothing wrong by kneeling on his victim's neck until he was dead. Judging from Chauvin's conspicuous failure to express remorse prior to his sentencing, he is sticking with the story he told at his state trial last year.
Prior to that trial, Chauvin's lawyer, Eric Nelson, blamed Floyd's death on an inept arrest by two rookie police officers, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane, who were responding to a complaint that Floyd had used a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes from a convenience store. "If Kueng and Lane had chosen to de-escalate instead of struggle," Nelson said, "Mr. Floyd may have survived." That was an audacious defense in light of Chauvin's subsequent treatment of Floyd, which was cruelly indifferent at best and hardly a model of de-escalation.
