Today’s verdict isn’t ‘justice’ .. but accountability is a first step to justice.
– Keith Ellison, Minnesota Attorney General
That a family had to lose a son, brother and father; that a teenage girl had to film and post a murder, that millions across the country had to organize and march just for George Floyd to be seen and valued is not justice. And this verdict is not a substitute for policy change’.
– Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Representative for New York’s 14th congressional district
I was watching the announcement of the verdict on live television today.
Man! Don’t mess this up for all of us! I thought of the jury.
The guilty verdict of former police officer Chauvin is a relief, but a very rare outcome. In many other egregious cases over the last 20 years, the law enforcement officer had come off scot free.
Sentencing is in 8 weeks, and the remaining officers (Lane, Thao, and Kueng) charged in the death of George Floyd, will be tried together on August 23.
All of this made me think back to the verdict in the OJ Simpson trial, in October of 1995. I had arrived on the shores of the United States that February. My coworkers and I, at Anheuser-Busch in downtown St Louis, MO, rushed down to the lobby to see the announcement on television. That jury handed down a verdict that dismayed many people, but the majority of African Americans supported it. They saw Simpson’s acquittal as a victory in a legal system that systematically discriminates against them.