April 7, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
06:35
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| First of all, I don't think people understand, and I'm probably one of them. | |
| What exactly is he prosecuted? | |
| Is it third degree, second degree, first degree? | |
| What is the exact charge? | |
| There are three charges, Dennis. | |
| There are two murder charges and one manslaughter. | |
| The murder charges are both unintentional homicide. | |
| There is murder in the second degree, and the theory behind that is that A person is unintentionally killed in the course of somebody committing another crime. | |
| So the theory that they're pursuing is that at a certain point, because Chauvin used excessive force, the restraint became a criminal assault, and it caused Floyd's death. | |
| So they have to prove that the criminal assault was intentional. | |
| Not that they intended to cause death. | |
| And that second-degree murder, you can get 40 years for that. | |
| The second charge is third-degree murder, and the theory of that is depraved indifference to human life. | |
| That is, that the officer used tactics which exhibited such an amoral, depraved... | |
| The best example I remember from law school is the person who shoots a Shoots a gun into a crowd where it's indiscriminate. | |
| You're not trying to kill any particular person, but you're completely heedless of what kind of danger you put people in. | |
| So that's the third-degree charge, and you can get up to 25 years for that. | |
| And then finally, there's manslaughter, which is negligent homicide, which is that you're not intending to cause the death of the person, but you fail in some duty of care. | |
| In a way that's so grossly negligent that you create a dangerous situation and death is caused. | |
| So those are the three charges. | |
| And what is the punishment for that? | |
| I believe it's up to 10 years, but it may be less than that. | |
| So it shows how little I know about the way courts work. | |
| What is this notion of throwing three different charges? | |
| What is it sort of like? | |
| I get three chances with my darts to hit a bullseye? | |
| Well, as a prosecutor, you're allowed to charge any offense that a rational jury could reasonably conclude you proved. | |
| And it would be problematic for the prosecutors if they were charging counts that were internally inconsistent. | |
| These are really counts that are internally consistent, but they hinge on questions of causation and what was going on in Chauvin's mind. | |
| So there's not a lot of – I shouldn't say there's not a lot of dispute about what physically happened because, in fact, there is some dispute about whether Chauvin physically sat on Floyd's neck. | |
| Or, as his defense is showing, and I think they're doing a very good job with this with the expert witnesses, that he really put pressure between the shoulder blades and touched on the neck, but not in a way that would have inhibited Floyd's breathing, which is a very important issue in the case. | |
| But you're allowed to charge things that are consistent. | |
| Andrew McCarthy, will the defense claim that if Derek Chauvin had done nothing, the amount of fentanyl in George Floyd's bloodstream would have killed him anyway? | |
| Yes. | |
| And I think, Dennis, you've hit on something that turns out to be very important because the prosecutor in the opening, this is not a place you want to be as the prosecutor. | |
| He basically said that, yes, it's true that Floyd may have had so much fentanyl in his system that it would have killed a normal person, but because he was a drug abuser for so long, he had built up a tolerance to it. | |
| That's really not, I mean, that may be true, but it's not where you want to be. | |
| Oh, so that, so... | |
| How does the jury decide? | |
| They're going to hear a lot of experts. | |
| I think in the coming days they're going to get a lot of medical expert testimony on the issue of causation. | |
| I'm putting you on the spot, and you have perfect right to say you don't know or you'll decide later. | |
| In your heart, right now, do you think that Derek Chauvin killed him? | |
| Not in the sense of murder. | |
| I think there's a pretty good manslaughter case. | |
| I think there's a very weak depraved indifference to human life case. | |
| And the question of whether the force was so excessive that it should be criminal assault for purposes of murder in the second degree, I think that's what the case is really going to come down to. | |
| And that's a tough call right now. | |
| I'm sorry, what's the tough call? | |
| Whether it's second-degree murder or manslaughter? | |
| Whether it's excessive force that rises to the level of... | |
| Of second-degree murder. | |
| Of a criminal assault. | |
| If they can prove this is a criminal assault dentist, then they're most of the way home to proving second-degree murder. | |
| Oddly, I think the proof of second-degree murder now is stronger than third-degree murder. | |
| I actually think third-degree murder is frivolous almost at this point. | |
| You mean the depraved indifference charge? | |
| Yeah, I think there's enough evidence that Chauvin did not do the, you know, worst case scenario that's been described in the political narrative. | |
| It wasn't choking. | |
| You know, the way he applied this neck hold, it was not something that was against police procedure. | |
| All right, one more question. | |
| I don't see how they proved that. | |
| Can I keep calling on you? | |
| Yeah, of course. | |
| You can call me anytime, my friend. | |
| Holy crow. | |
| That's great. | |
| We gotta find out if he smokes cigars. |
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