Chauvin Trial Day 12 Wrap-Up: Defense Use-of-Force Expert Witness Falls Short

Defense needed, but did not get, perfect performance from expert Barry Brodd

Welcome to our ongoing coverage of the Minnesota murder trial of Derek Chauvin, over the in-custody death of George Floyd.  I am Attorney Andrew Branca for Law of Self Defense.

Today started off with a major shift in the court’s proceedings, with the state resting its presentation of its case in chief, and the defense beginning its presentation of its own case in chief to the jury.

Up to this point the defense was limited to playing (if you’ll forgive the metaphor in this context) on defense.  With all the witnesses so far having been called by the state, it was the state that controlled not only who would testify at all, but also the scope of that testimony. While the defense had the privilege to cross-examine those witnesses, cross-examination is limited to the scope of direct questioning.  That is, if the state didn’t ask about it on direct, the defense couldn’t ask about it on cross.

Now the tables would be reversed, with the defense able to call witnesses that the state would rather the jury not see, and the scope of the questioning of those witnesses would be controlled by Defense Counsel Eric Nelson and not by the prosecution.

Throughout the day the defense moved speedily through six witnesses, including retired MPD Officer Scott Creighton, involved in Floyd’s year-earlier arrest-related drug ingestion event, and whose testimony included body camera footage of that event; retired paramedic and nurse Michelle Moseng, involved at the same event and the person who had observed Floyd’s sky-high blood pressure of 200/160 [!]; Shawanda Hill, the woman in Floyd’s SUV on May 25, 2020, the date of Floyd’s death; Minneapolis Parks Police Officer Peter Chang, who was present on duty at Floyd’s May 25,2020 arrest, and whose testimony included his body camera footage of that event; Minneapolis Police Department medical training coordinator Nicole MacKenzie, recalled as a defense witness after testifying for the state earlier in the trial; and finally Barry Brodd, the use-of-force expert witness retained by the defense for this trial.

I’ll state up front that all of those witnesses were helpful to the defense narrative of innocence in this case to at least some degree, really without exception.  In my view, however, the three most important, at least in the context of the defense case in chief we’ve seen so far, were use-of-force expert Brodd, Parks Officer Chang, and Floyd ex-girlfriend Shawanda Hill, as well as the body camera footage of Officer Creighton.

Barry Brodd, Defense Use-of-Force Expert Witness

The witness I’ll focus on the most here, however, is use-of-force expert witness Barry Brodd, and that’s not because he did a great job on the witness stand for the defense. Indeed, I found Brodd’s performance to fall astonishingly short of what the defense needed in this case, particularly in the specific context of use-of-force expertise.

In my live blogging comments today I at one point characterized Brodd’s performance as a train wreck for the defense, and I expect some folks will think that’s too extreme a characterization.  Maybe his testimony was far from perfect, one might think, but he hardly became a witness explicitly favorable to the state, as had several state witnesses become explicitly favorable for the defense.  Maybe a fairer characterization is “not great,” but also “not terrible”?

The answer to that question is a hard no.  Maybe in a more normal case a mere “not great” would be enough.  But this is not a normal case.  Even just considering the legal dynamics alone, the state has just spent a bit over two weeks presenting a great number of witnesses, including many highly credentialed expert witnesses, all by a rotating panel of four skilled prosecutors.

Further, there are two main paths of attack for the prosecution on the facts of this case:  first, that Chauvin’s conduct was a substantial contributor to Floyd’s death, and perhaps even the primary cause; and second, that Chauvin was not justified in his use of force upon Floyd.

It’s true that the state must win both those battles. If the defense wins either of those legal battles—that is, convinces the jury either that Floyd died of other causes absent substantial contribution by Chauvin, or convinces the jury that even if Chauvin caused Floyd’s death he was nevertheless justified in his use of force upon Floyd—then as a matter of simple legal reasoning the prosecution cannot prove Chauvin guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

The state, recognizing this dual challenge, has brought a huge mass of evidence and legal argument to both of those battles (frankly, to an extent that many judges would have found much of the state’s evidence to be cumulative and inadmissible).

In the context of the mechanism of how Chauvin purportedly caused Floyd’s death they’ve attacked on multiple fronts, including blood choke, respiratory choke, positional asphyxiation, denial of care, and probably more I’ve not bothered storing in memory.

In the context of the purported lack of justification for Chauvin’s use of force upon Floyd, the state has brought forward a plethora of Minneapolis police officers and senior management, as well as use-of-force experts, to provide testimony to that effect.

Frankly, I’ve always felt the best defense for the (uh) defense was on the justification for use-of-force front.  The state’s testimony on this issue was sketchy at best, and often catastrophically bad for the prosecution.

Several of the state’s police witnesses on this front were effectively turned into defense witnesses by Defense Counsel Nelson on cross-examination.  Further, I had little difficulty envisioning a narrative of justification for Chauvin’s use of force upon Floyd for every moment of the event encounter between Chauvin and Floyd.

In contrast, the medical defense struck me as much more challenging for the defense, especially with the number of well-credentialed medical and scientific experts the state brought in to testify (again, arguably in a manner that qualifies as impermissibly cumulative testimony).

Use-of-force justification and polices are vastly easier to explain to a lay jury than are the medical sciences of cardiology, pulmonology, oncology, physiology, and more.

For that focus on the defense of justification to work, however, it had to meet a particular condition—it had to be near perfect, virtually pristine in its clarity, compelling in its obviousness, undeniable in its correctness.

And that’s just in the legal argument context. Throw in the political context, and the racial context, and the rioting, looting, and arson context, and it is all the more important that the defense approach perfection if it is to have any hope of achieving an acquittal.

So while I could not possibly know how Nelson was going to craft that narrative of justification, I knew what it had to look like by the time he was done, and I could envision how I would go about achieving that state of virtual perfection in a justification defense if I were making the effort.

It’s that state of near perfection that use-of-force expert Barry Brodd needed to deliver today, and when I say I felt much of his testimony was a train wreck, it [is] in the context of that very high expectation and standard.  Was he OK? Sure, he was OK, sometimes good, sometimes not good, overall, mediocre.

Did he approach the perfection necessary in this case?  Not. Even Close.

Brodd Direct Questioning

Frankly, I thought Brodd was weak from the very start, on direct questioning by Nelson, In all fairness however, the primary fault for that lies not with Brodd, but with Nelson. He was the conductor of the symphony now, and had the mission of extracting from Brodd a near perfect narrative of justified use of force.

Ideally, this narrative would address not only a narrative of justification that looked good when considering the facts in only a favorable light, but one that also addressed possible points of attack by the prosecution—indeed, that addressed every possible point of attack by the prosecution.

It was on this second point that the direct questioning of Brodd fell short.

Sure, Nelson got a narrative of justified use of force out of Brodd, but it was one that appeared had never been prepared or stress tested for resilience against cross-examination by skilled and motivated opposing counsel.  It looked good on the surface, but the failure to effectively armor this narrative of justification against attack on cross-examination left that narrative—and expert Brodd himself—humiliatingly vulnerable to damage on cross-examination.

And that’s on Nelson, much more so that it is on Brodd. Leadership gains the kudos of success, but also bears the responsibility of failure, and Nelson is the leader in this particular relationship.

That said, I personally cannot imagine ever recommending Brodd as a use-of-force expert witness in any case in which I’m involved, not after his performance here and in the trial of Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke, who would go on to be convicted of murder in the shooting death of knife-wielding Laquan McDonald back in 2014. And that’s true even if Brodd were free, much less if he cost the $11,000 plus he was paid for services on this case.

Nelson’s direct questioning would have appeared to be going well on the surface, as Brodd provided testimony favorable for the defense on point after point.  At least, it would appear to be going well if one didn’t know the likely points of attack that would be made by the prosecution on cross—if one did know those likely points of attack, it was pretty obvious even on direct that they were not being sufficiently armored against attack.

Just as the state’s expert witnesses had done for the state, Nelson’s use-of-force expert witness said the magic words the defense required of him:  in effect, that Derek Chauvin was acting with objective reasonableness, following MPD and current national standards of law enforcement, in his interactions with George Floyd.

Nelson also had Brodd touch upon a number of truly important points in the necessary narrative of justified use of force.

For example, it’s not the severity of the initial call that controls how much force may be used, but how severe the interaction becomes over its entire duration—a call for a minor offense could become a deadly force confrontation.

Further, how much force a reasonable officer was obliged to use was, at the end of the day, a decision made by the suspect—whether they complied or resisted, and if they resisted to what intensity.

Nelson also had Brodd testify about the reality that a reasonable officer was permitted to use force not just against actions being taken by a suspect in the moment, but against actions which were imminently about to be taken (suspect reaching for an apparent, but not yet seen, weapon) or even heightened risks of harm (suspect refusing to show his hands, to maintain position, and so forth).

Nelson also had Brodd make clear that the factors involved in determining the reasonableness of a use of force included not just the three factors bulleted in the MPD manual—severity of the crime, threat of the suspect, resistance/flight of the suspect—but the entire totality of the circumstances and knowledge possessed by the officer.

Brodd also informed the jury that an officer could use force even if a suspect wasn’t using any force against the officer or others—for example, if the officer had a reasonable suspicion that a suspect had committed a crime, and the suspect refused commands to stop walking away, the officer could use force to detain the suspect, and even handcuff the suspect, without having to meet the higher requirements of a formal arrest.

As I discussed yesterday, when Nelson touched upon the issue of proportionately in the context of police use of force upon suspects, I really felt his conceptualization of this was very weak.  He once again presented this concept as one in which the officer is allowed to “up-level,” or what Nelson described as “one-upsmanship,” the degree of force against suspects, use one level higher force than the suspect.

Brodd fully agreed with Nelson’s approach here, but this conceptualization of proportionality, however, has real vulnerabilities to attack, and the prosecution would make full use of them

Nelson also touched upon the relevance of possible intoxication of a suspect, or possible large disparity in size or strength between officer and suspect, as important factors in evaluating threat and risk in police use of force, and once again Brodd agreed. Again, however, Nelson failed to armor these issues against attack, leaving them exposed and vulnerable on cross.

Brodd also confirmed that even a handcuffed suspect could continue to be dangerous to officers or others, or perhaps to attempt flight and escape.

Further, Nelson touched on the importance of matching a suspect’s words to their actions, and being alert to inconsistencies—both in the context of claimed distress as well as purported compliance.

On the issue of positional asphyxia, Brodd indicated that it was really only a risk for obese suspects—which Floyd obviously was not.

On the issue of the bystander crowd, even just two people could qualify as a crowd if they had gathered for a similar purpose.

Importantly, Brodd testified that in his view of the videos of Floyd’s arrest he could clearly see Chauvin’s attention being distracted away from his suspect and towards the growing and increasingly hostile crowd.  (Did the mob kill Floyd?)

So far, so good.

Then, however, Nelson’s direct questioning of Brodd opened a huge target of attack for the prosecution, when Brodd testified that he didn’t consider prone restraint to be a form of use-of-force.

At. All.

Folks, that’s simply not a reasonable use of the concept of force.  It is common police practice to describe even mere physical presence or verbal commands as a form of force. Certainly anything involving the laying on of hands by an officer on a suspect is going to be considered a use of physical force.

Going hands on may not be a lot of force. It may be just minimal force. Maybe even the most minimal force imaginable.

But definitely force. Certainly not non-force.

The difficulty of describing prone restraint as zero force is that, first, it seems preposterous on its face, but second, it suggests that in that case only zero force was justified under the circumstances.  When the preposterousness is exposed, however, and the actual use of force revealed, then even the most minimal force appears unjustified under the circumstances.

(video)

Prosecutor Schleicher would make use of every one of these avenues of attack on cross-examination, and more. One indication of the value of Brodd as a witness for the state is that whereas Nelson spent about 45 minutes on direct questioning of Brodd, the state spent almost 1 hour and 20 minutes on cross-examination of him.

Schleicher immediately attacked Brodd’s view that prone restraint was not a form of force at all.

So, Floyd, in handcuffs, prone, on a hard street, that was not a use of force at all. Correct, answered, Brodd. Not even if the enforced position caused Floyd pain?  That position doesn’t cause pain.  Not even with a cop on top of your back and neck?  Not even given the abrasions to Floyd’s face and shoulder from the street?  (Schleicher didn’t mention, but should have, that Chauvin was also gripping Floyd’s hand in an explicit pain-compliance technique.)

Given that description, and of course that Floyd was complaining of pain throughout, Brodd’s characterization of Floyd’s prone restraint as being one not involving pain or discomfort became ridiculous.

Ultimately Brodd would concede that perhaps Floyd’s prone restraint could have involved pain or discomfort—indeed, we would hear “could” and “possible” a great deal in Brodd’s testimony on cross-examination—which of course now meant that the prone restraint as applied to Floyd was, by Brodd’s own standards, a use of force after all.

A common occurrence in Brodd’s cross-examination was that Schleicher would make some claim favorable to the prosecution—for example, that Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s neck throughout the prone restraint, a claim that had already been contested throughout the state’s case in chief—and then essentially badger Brodd—the defense use-of-force expert witness!—into agreeing with the state’s position.

Another favorite tactic of Schleicher used in the cross-examination of Brodd was to isolate specific facts of the event, separate them from the greater context of the totality of the circumstances so as to place them in a light most favorable to the state, and then badger Brodd into conceding that this view was either correct, or at least possible.

Schleicher often facilitated this “facts in isolation” tactic by supplementing his cross with still photographs of the 9 minute plus prone restraint, or perhaps isolated 10 second videos obviously carefully chosen to maximize the apparent reasonableness of the state’s position, and minimize the reasonableness of the defense position.

Is a suspect’s intoxication, by itself, sufficient to justify a use of force by an officer? Can an officer use force on someone merely because they are intoxicated? Brodd agreed not. What about a suspect’s disparate size, could an offer use force on someone merely because they were much larger than the officer? Brodd agreed not.

Of course, nobody is attempting to justify the use of force on the basis of any of those factors in isolation—rather, those are among the many factors that play a role in the totality of the circumstances.

This necessary clarity of the use-of-force concept, however, was lost during Brodd’s cross-examination.

Schleicher showed Brodd various snapshots of the gathering crowd, staring with two people present, then four, then six—but all during periods when the crowd had not yet grown loud and hostile, but was still calmly filming events.  Was this calm crowd a threat to the officers that should distract their attention from Floyd? Of course not, and Brodd agreed. But, of course, what was missing was the relevant context of when the crowd was loud and hostile.

What Brodd should have done in each of these instances was simply to decline to provide a an opinion, to a reasonable degree of professional certainty (the relevant legal standard) by considering these elements in isolation. He should have explained that his role as an expert witness was precisely that, to deliver an opinion to a reasonable degree of professional certainty, and that meant considering the totality of the circumstances.

While it’s true that witnesses on cross-examination will largely be pressed to give just yes or no answers to questions from opposing counsel, expert witnesses are given considerably more leeway than are non-expert witnesses, and Judge Cahill has proven to be inclined to allow experts exactly that leeway.

Instead, Brodd would accept the single-factor hypothetical, which was of course carefully framed such that a yes favored the state, and then agree that the hypothetical was true—or at least “possible.”

These isolated, out-of-context questions touched upon such important issues as how much weight Chauvin was applying to Floyd—as if a still photo of a moment frozen in time could convey shifting weight balance over a 9-minute period.

Similarly, is it hard to move a suspect into recovery prone? No, it’s easy, answered Brodd.  Of course, the necessary context also involved whether the officer’s attention was diverted to the growing crowd, whether rolling Floyd backwards away from the cruiser would have dangerously exposed both Floyd and the officers themselves to passing traffic behind them, and even whether it reasonably appeared that doing so was a necessary precaution at all—after all, for most of that 9 minutes Floyd was talking, and EMS was believed to be just a minute or two away.

Isn’t the passing of a bad $20 bill really a small crime, no matter if the state lists it as a felony, compared to say domestic assault, which the state lists as a misdemeanor, at least in the context of risk of physical violence?  Sure, answered Brodd.  Of course, the necessary context is that the use-of-force upon Floyd was not premised on his passing of a $20 bill—for which he likely would have ended up with just a summons—but for his forcible resistance of the officer’s lawful efforts to place him in the squad car. Not even the prosecution contests that the police were privileged to their use-of force for that purpose.

Schleicher also effectively eliminated the notion that officers were privileged to use force to prevent an apparently imminent threat, or to mitigate the prospects that a reasonably inferred threat might occur. Under the Schleicher model there were either active threats—suspect violence in action in the moment, against which an officer could use force—or there were mere risks, against which zero force could be used by an officer. Period.

The simple truth is that not even non-officers have to wait until they are the victim of a violent attack before they can use defensive force.  We are all privileged to use defensive force to stop even an attack that merely reasonably appears imminent and has not yet been executed.

Another important consideration is that there is a distinction between offensive force and protective force.  Sure, an officer may be privileged to use offensive force to neutralize an active attack, or an imminent attack, or a reasonably inferred risk of an attack. But an officer can also use force for protective purposes.

For example, we’ve all seen in the movies where an officer places a hand on a suspect’s head as they place a suspect into a patrol car. That’s a use of force that’s not intended to neutralize an attack by that suspect, but to protect that suspect from head injury as he enters the vehicle—and it’s completely justified as such.

Similarly, if an officer saw an intoxicated person wandering near the edge of a cliff, he’d be privileged to use force to compel that person out of the zone of danger, even though the person presented no active threat to the officer or anybody else.

In this context, there is an argument to be made that for the early portion of the restraint of Floyd the prone restraint was being used to neutralize any threat he may present to the officers arresting him or to the process of arrest itself—but that for the last few minutes of the restraint it was being used protectively for the benefit of Floyd, to ensure that he didn’t regain consciousness on a busy road and that he remained present for the arrival of medical professionals.

Under the Schleicher model, however, it was either active threat, force allowed, or no active threat, a mere risk of a threat, zero force allowed.

And, sure enough, Schleicher badgered Brodd into agreeing that officers could not use force against a mere risk, thus zero force allowed—and surely after Floyd lost consciousness he was at worst a risk, not an active threat, and thus Chauvin was not privileged to use force against Floyd at all.

Schleicher also morphed the concept of “situational awareness” from one in which an officer was obliged to manage a difficult and complex array of sensory inputs, to a model in which an officer who failed to perfectly integrate every possible value without error failed to meet the standard of an objectively reasonable police officer—and when Brodd was questioned by Schleicher on these points the responses were yes, yes, yes, and the occasional, could.

This meant, in Schleicher’s telling, that it was nonsense to imagine that the hostile crowd might have distracted Chauvin from his suspect, but rather Chauvin had an absolutely legal obligation to pay perfect and equal attention to everything, simultaneously, without failure.

That, folks, is neither a reasonable expectation for any human being, nor is it a view that, if believed by the jury, makes things any easier for Chauvin’s defense.

As I mentioned, there’s about 1 hour and 20 minutes of this stuff, all about as equally bad as what I’ve described above, so I can’t possibly step through all of it. I do, however, encourage you to watch the video of Brodd’s cross-examination here:

(video)

There was also a re-direct of Brodd by Nelson, and I will say that Nelson made up some important ground there, ground not greatly diminished by Schleicher’s subsequent and very brief re-cross of Brodd.

By then, however, Brodd was in a very, very deep hole that he ought not to have been in to begin with. And, frankly, I wonder if the fault for the poor cross-examination doesn’t fall to Nelson as well. Perhaps Nelson drilled Brodd hard on how to handle the very predictable attacks brought to bear by Schleicher –but given that Nelson had not pre-empted these attacks on direct, I’m thinking perhaps that preparation did not occur. It certainly looked as if had not occurred.

(2 videos)

Bottom Line for Brodd Testimony

For me, the bottom line for Brodd’s testimony as the defense use-of-force expert witness in this trial was to deliver a perfect and coherent use-of-force justification that was largely, if not entirely, invulnerable to substantive damage upon cross-examination by the state.

I know that sounds unrealistic, but I can tell you I’ve seen it done. It was accomplished by the use-of-force expert in the George Zimmerman case, for example.

Because I don’t believe Brodd accomplished that necessary mission, in my view he felt short of requirements for this trial.  I’m not certain whether that’s more the fault of Nelson or more the fault of Brodd. I am certain, however, that it is Chauvin who faces paying the price.

Direct of Peter Chang, Parks Officer

On a more positive note for the defense, the testimony of Parks Officer Peter Chang was pretty fantastic for the defense.  This includes both the in-court testimony of Chang himself, as well as the “virtual testimony” provided by the body camera footage of Chang at the scene of Floyd’s arrest—which video captured a lot of “testimony” by such characters as Shawanda Hill, the female passenger in Floyd’s car, Morries Hall, the male passenger in Floyd’s car, and even Charles McMillian, the 61-year-old bystander witness of Floyd’s arrest.

Chang was on duty in a nearby park when he heard the radio chatter about Floyd’s arrest, including that police were taking someone [Floyd] out of a vehicle, believed he heard a struggle over the radio, and self-assigned himself as backup to the scene.

Chang had remarkably favorable testimony for the defense, perhaps most importantly that he perceived the growing and angry crowd as a prospective threat to the officers on scene.  Indeed, he described the crowd as “very aggressive” to the officers. Unfortunately, not as much was made of this on direct of use-of-force expert Brodd as I would have liked to have seen.

Even better than Chang’s actual testimony in court, however, is what was captured by his body worn camera.

First, the manner in which the footage of his camera continually panned left and right over the scene, from where he was tasked with controlling Hill and Hall by Floyd’s SUV, to across the street where the officers struggled with Floyd and then endured the insults and threats of the hostile crowd, was physical conduct that strongly reinforced his stated perception of the crowd as aggressive.

The commentary of Hill, Hall, and McMillian was particularly helpful to the defense.

Hill can be heard exclaiming aloud: “Man, [Floyd] STILL won’t get in the car. Just get in George!” and “WHAT is he doing? Now he’s going to go to jail!”

Morries Hall can be heard muttering about Floyd: “He over there fighting with the law and sh!t!”

McMillian is overheard telling Hill and Hall: “I saw everything, [Floyd] fucked up. He fucked up. I tried to get him to get into the car, told him he can’t win.”

It was pretty good stuff for the defense.

(video)

Cross-examination of Chang, conducted by Prosecutor Frank, was what I would describe as ineffective.  You can watch that here:

(video)

Direct Questioning of Shawanda Hill

Not only did Shawanda Hill, the female passenger in Floyd’s SUV and also described as his “ex-girlfriend” appear in the body camera footage of Officer Chang, she also appeared in court today to testify in person.

And, remarkably, overall her testimony was favorable to the defense, which would explain why despite being Floyd’s friend she was called as a witness by the defense and not by the state.

The most important part of her testimony for the defense was describing how Floyd was initially pretty regular in demeanor when he first attempted to pass a bad bill in the Cup Foods store, but that shortly after returning to the Mercedes SUV he suddenly fell asleep. Indeed, he fell into such a deep sleep that she could not rouse him, or when roused he immediately fell asleep again. It was bad enough that she gave up the idea of getting a ride home from Floyd, and called her daughter to come pick her up.

Once Nelson got that testimony out of her, he was done with her direct questioning, which you can view here:

(video)

On cross-examination Hill surprisingly presented some difficulty for Prosecutor Frank.  At one point when he was having difficulty getting a straight answer from her, she kindly offered to explain if he liked.  He invited her to do so.

Accepting his invitation, Hill immediately began a lengthy monologue about how Floyd had tried to pass a bad $20 bill, how he wouldn’t awake when police were knocking on his car window with a flashlight, how she was desperately trying to get him to rouse and comply with police, and—

At that point a horrified Prosecutor Frank abruptly interrupted her.

At which point she looked at him accusingly and said “YOU SAID EXPLAIN!”

Cross didn’t go any better for Frank after that.

Floyd fell asleep? Yes. But you woke him. Yes …. but then he fell asleep again.  But he did wake up? Yes … but he was not coherent at the time.

Frank switched to asking if Floyd had expressed any chest pains, shortness of breath, other similar symptoms of a heart attack, which Hill said he had not.

So, other than being sleepy and nodding off, he seemed normal?  Yes, Hill agreed.

Well, OK – but does that mean normal for an opioid addict high on fentanyl?

In any case that was it for cross-examination of Hill, which you can view here:

(2 videos)

OTHER WITNESSES

The other witnesses of the day were retired MPD Officer Scott Creighton, involved in Floyd’s year-earlier arrest-related drug ingestion event, and whose testimony included body camera footage of that event; retired paramedic and nurse Michelle Moseng, involved at the same event and the person who had observed Floyd’s sky-high blood pressure of 200/160 [!]; and Minneapolis Police Department medical training coordinator Nicole MacKenzie, recalled as a defense witness after testifying for the state earlier in the trial.

Their testimony is relatively short, and partly as a result worth listening to, but I’m afraid I’m out of time for providing commentary on it, and in any case it generally doesn’t require in-depth analysis.  I have, of course, included the video of their testimony below:

(8 videos)

And that’s about all I have for all of you this evening for our end-of-day wrap-up commentary and analysis of today’s court proceedings. (read more)

Chauvin Trial Day 11 Wrap-Up: Trial Expected to End Testimony This Week

Judge Cahill Tells Jury to Expect Deliberations, and Sequestration, On Monday

Welcome to our ongoing coverage of the Minnesota murder trial of Derek Chauvin, over the in-custody death of George Floyd.  I am Attorney Andrew Branca for Law of Self Defense.

Today the prosecution presented three of its final witnesses, as the state closes in on the end of its case in chief.

I’ll get to those witnesses in a moment but I don’t want to bury the lede, so here it is:

At the end of court today Judge Cahill informed the jury that they should expect testimony to end this week, and that they should arrive Monday ready for deliberations to begin-which means, bring an overnight bag, because once deliberations begin, sequestration of the jury begins.

Indeed, testimony may end prior to Friday—the judge informed the jury that the only reason he’s not going to plan on closing arguments happening on Friday is right after closing they need to be sequestered, and he doesn’t want to have to send the jury into sequestration for the weekend.

The obvious implication given that the state hasn’t yet quite concluded its case in chief? That the defense case in chief is expected to be no more than three days in duration.

That’s in contrast to roughly 11 days of the state’s case in chief.

So, we’re almost at the end of this rodeo, folks. I expect daily content on this trial from Law of Self Defense through the end of this week, then Monday we’ll start our traditional VERDICT WATCH! and of course we’ll share the final verdict—or mistrial—news with all of you as soon as we get it ourselves.

With that out of the way, let’s jump into today’s witnesses.

If the headline to today’s post didn’t give it away, two of today’s witnesses were among the most annoying seen in this trial, and indeed among the most annoying I’ve ever seen anywhere.  Those were Dr. Jonathan Rich, a Cardiologist out of Chicago, and Professor Seth Stoughton, a Law Professor and purported use-of-force policy & standards expert out of North Carolina, I believe.

Now, let me state up front that “most annoying” is my own subjective perception of these two, and perhaps reasonable people—including the jury—would disagree with my assessment. That’s why we include the video of their testimony, so you can make your own call on such matters.

State Witness Dr. Jonathan Rich, Cardiologist

Dr. Rich’s testimony as a cardiologist struck me as entirely cumulative of previous testimony heard earlier in this trial—and if you don’t understand the term cumulative as a legal term of art, read our mid-day post today to get a solid grasp of that.

The general idea is that at some point the essentially identical testimony from numerous sources tends to have a biasing effect on the jury, and thus is generally discouraged by the courts. They prefer you get your best witness on whatever the issue or fact recounting is, use them, and move one. Don’t use a half-dozen (or, in this trial, more!) witnesses to effectively provide mere variations on the same testimony.

We really didn’t learn anything from the state’s paid expert witness Rich that we hadn’t heard from the other state’s paid expert witnesses—as far as the state’s paid expert witnesses are concerned, the sole cause of the death of George Floyd was the subdual neck restraint and positional asphyxia to which he was subjected by the officers involved in his arrest.

I mean, we get it.

The only real difference was that Rich presented his view of the same conclusion using the wide-eyed manner and the tone of voice of an adult reading a “I’ve got two Daddy’s” sexual orientation guidance manual to elementary school children would use.

Again, that’s arguably (unquestionably) subjective on my part. Maybe as far as the jury was concerned, he completely knocked their socks off. He certainly had the CV of a world-class cardiologist moving up in the world.

Indeed, I had the definite impression that Dr. Rich’s next “move up” was to enter the world of trial expert witness testimony—once again, in Dr. Rich we have a state expert witness who has never before been an expert witness. First time out. In a case of this high profile.

And he did it for free, at least until he actually showed up to testify in court, at which point he’s getting paid $1,200 a day. For all his prior effort (an effort other state’s expert witnesses have indicated exceeded 100 hours of work) it was free.

Again, in the context of Dr. Rich, he said what the state needed him to say:

George Floyd died from cardiopulmonary arrest caused by low oxygen levels, those were induced by the prone restraint and positional asphyxiation that he was subjected to.

Of course, we’re once again dealing with a physician making detailed clinical findings based on other people’s reports, and smartphone, body camera, and surveillance video, without ever having actually seen or examined the patient in any way.

Further, like all the previous similarly minded physicians who similarly lacked direct examination of Floyd, Rich very much presented the appearance of someone who’d watched the most awful looking part of the Floyd bystander video, drawn an immediate conclusion, and then identified an opportunity for professional advancement by working his way backwards from that conclusion to a speculative medical rationale consistent with where they once again wanted to end up.

I won’t spend much time on his direct testimony, as the quote above basically captures it.

Like some earlier state expert witnesses, Rich claimed to be able to identify on video the precise moment that Floyd went into cardiopulmonary event, right there on the street in front of Cup Foods—in contrast to other state expert witnesses, for example Dr. Baker the only physician in all of this who actually laid hands on Floyd’s body for post-mortem examination, and who testified that he believed Floyd was alive when put into the ambulance and didn’t die until he reached the hospital.

If that sounds to you like the state’s expert witnesses fostering reasonable doubt around Floyd’s manner of death, welcome to the club.

Dr. Rich also had some views of cardiovascular physiology and function that struck me as rather odd. Granted, I’m no cardiologist. Still—very odd.

For example, George Floyd’s enlarged heart, technically cardiomegalopathy driven by hypertension of the sort that ultimately leads to congestive heart failure and death, was not the sign of compromised physiology, but actually a strength—literally.  You see, that was just Floyd’s heart getting stronger, just like if you go to the gym and lift weights.

In other words, cardiomegalopathy is not a glitch, it’s a feature!

I kid you not.

Rich also participated eagerly in the prosecution’s preferred means of medical deception of the jury, which is to conflate narrowly defined medical terms of art with much broader commonplace terms for physical ailments, and then deny the presence of the narrow term to suggest denial of the broader common term.

Example: Did Floyd have a “heart attack”? Why, no, there was no sign of ischemic occlusion in the coronary arteries.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Floyd didn’t die as a result of his heart failing because it received an insufficient supply of oxygen due to causes largely independent of Chauvin’s knee, such as 90% occlusion of coronary arteries, fentanyl overdose, methamphetamine use, a lifetime of drug abuse generally, pathological hypertension, COVID, the decision to fight four officers in an effort to avoid lawful arrest.

It merely means that the precise manner of Floyd’s heart stopping was not an abruptly formed clot resulting from the rupture of atherosclerotic plaques in his coronary arteries—and Dr. Rich was happy to detail to us that no such plaque rupture was reported to have occurred.

For anyone who doesn’t understand the distinction, however—and who on the jury would?—the conflation works. It sounds as if the annoying and patronizing doctor said that Floyd’s health couldn’t have pooped the bed for reasons other than Chauvin’s knee, which was, of course, the state’s goal in calling Rich to the witness stand.

Dr. Rich also had remarkably succinct and definite notions on whether anything other than Chauvin’s knee could have killed Floyd. Fentanyl overdose. Nope. Meth? Nope. Why not? Floyd’s a drug user, probably had tolerance.

Any mention of Floyd being “clean” for a considerable period of time, until a couple of weeks prior to his death, as recounted in testimony by his co-addict lady friend, suggesting a much reduced tolerance relative to a chronic user? Nope.

Dr. Rich also happily participated in another common rhetorical sleight of hand used repeatedly by the prosecution on the issue of whether Floyd could have overdosed.  The state asks Rich if Floyd’s death had the typical appearance of someone suffering solely from a fentanyl overdose—the sleepiness, for example, and difficulty speaking clearly or responding properly to others?

Nope, answers, Dr. Rich, I saw nothing like that in all the videos I watched.

Setting aside the testimony the jury may never hear about Floyd’s passengers in his SUV being unable to awaken him to the point that they called others to come pick them up from the intersection of Chicago and 38th, the question entirely ignores the broader context of Floyd’s actual circumstances.

What’s a fentanyl overdose look like when, for example, it’s combined with meth, a powerful stimulant? When it’s combined with acute ingestion followed immediately by a 10-minute physical confrontation with four police officers?  I expect that begins to look a lot more like what we observed Floyd experiencing.

Rich also informed the jury that “I counted the minutes that Floyd was pulseless without CPR,” as part of the state’s argument that delayed care by Chauvin and the other officers is what killed Floyd.

In fact, the period of time from which the officers determine they can’t find a pulse to the arrival of the paramedics the officers know to be en route per code 3 lights and sirens is about 90 seconds, not minutes.

None of that matters, however, because the good Dr. Rich informs the jury that had Floyd not been subject to the neck compression and subdual restraint to which he’d been subject for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, he’d still be alive today.

In follow up the state asked if it was true that nobody, not a healthy person on the face of the Earth, could have survived that 9 minutes and 29 seconds of neck compression and subdual restraint. Defense counsel Nelson objected, Judge Cahill sustained the objection, the state asked the question a second time in slightly modified form, objection again, sustained again.

The bottom line from Dr. Rich’s testimony was that nothing else about Floyd could possibly have killed him, but for the conduct of the officers.  90% occlusion of coronary arteries? Nope. Fentanyl overdose. Nope. Pathological hypertension? Nope.

Other people die of those things? Yes.

But not Floyd? Nope.

Could Floyd have had a heart attack? Nope, no chest pain.

Left unasked by Nelson, however—might 11 ng/ml of the powerful pain reliever fentanyl have allowed for a painless heart attack without chest pain?  Alternatively, might the pain-inducing effects of the pills Floyd have taken—remember, essentially identical pills had sent him to the ER previously in similar excruciating pain—have simply masked the chest pain of a heart attack?

Here again Dr. Rich made a remarkable characterization of heart disease for a cardiologist.  Remember when having a pathologically enlarged heart was a feature, not a glitch?

Well, apparently having 90% occluded coronary arteries was also a feature, and not a glitch. Because when the coronary arteries got sufficiently occluded, the heart would begin to grow collateral blood vessels to make up for the constricted blood flow of the primary coronary arteries.

Indeed, it’s actually less risky to have a higher degree of coronary artery blockage that fostered collateral blood vessel formation than it is to have a lower degree of coronary artery blockage! Who knew?

As wide-eyed and dramatic as Dr. Rich was on direct by the state, he was tremulous and shaking on cross-examination—not unusual for someone serving as an expert witness in a prominent trial for the first time ever.

Nelson also spent some time with Dr. Rich discussing Floyd’s paraganglioma, which has the theoretical capability to dump a massive bolus of adrenaline into the body and cause a cardiac arrest.  This never seemed to go anywhere really, and I’m undecided about whether Nelson is doing just enough to establish some foundation for a medical expert witness he plans to bring into court for the defense case in chief.

As his last question, Nelson asked if it were possible after the lungs stopped for respiration to continue.  This seemed an odd question, and highly unlikely physiologically, but it turns out that’s why I’m a small-town lawyer and not a doctor.

According to Dr. Rich it is, indeed, possible for there to be a few extra breaths after the drivers of respiration have given up the ghost, although he wasn’t certain of the mechanism behind that physiological effect.  (It would later turn out one reason this question was important was that it appears the officers believed Floyd to still be breathing after the point where some state witness claimed they’d identified his death from their observation of videos.)

(4 videos)

State Witness Philonise Floyd

The next state’s witness was Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd.  I won’t spend much time on this testimony, because the brother has no first-hand knowledge about the events surrounding Floyd’s death, he isn’t positioned to offer an expert opinion, and so he can’t offer testimony that would be relevant to the legal merits of the prosecution or defense in this case.

So why have him testify at all? Well, most states would not allow such testimony at this point in a trial, precisely because it doesn’t go to the legal merits of the case.

It’s an odd feature of Minnesota law, however, that they allow what they call ‘spark of life’ evidence in the prosecution’s case in chief. This is basically testimony about how wonderful the deceased person was, how much his family loved him, and so forth.

In most states such testimony is permitted, but only in the sentencing phase of the trial. In other words, after guilt has been determined the court can take such testimony into account for purposes of sentencing. Normally, however, such testimony is deemed not relevant to determining guilt or non-guilt in the first place.

Before I embed the “spark of life” testimony below, I do want to make clear that I’m addressing it only lightly because of its lack of relevance to the merits of the case, and not due to a lack of merit itself. Whatever one might think of George Floyd, and he certainly appeared to have a well-checkered history, I’ve no doubt his family loved him, and miss him terribly. And that’s as real as anything ever is.

That said, here’s that testimony—it’s solely direct questioning the defense wisely declined to conduct cross.

(video)

State Witness Seth Stoughton

The last state witness of the day, and amongst the two most annoying of the trial, was Professor Seth Stoughton. He’s a law professor who had briefly (< 5 years) served as a police officer in Florida, and is now into the use-of-force expert witness game. And, at least in this case, the game pays well—he testified that he’s been paid about $25,000 for his expertise by state prosecutors, for just over 100-hours worth of work on this case.  (In my professional opinion, that beats doing the work for free, as some other state witnesses have done.)

I’m told by others who have looked online that Stoughton appears to be among the more rabid defund the police, reform the RACISTPOLICEMURDERERS activists out there. I make it a practice, however, to limit my trial commentary and analysis to what I actually see in court, and nothing much like that appeared in court (with one modest exception), so I’ll leave the reader to their own efforts in developing an internet-based understanding of Professor Stoughton.

As has now grown familiar, Stoughton was there to say the magic words for the prosecutors in this trial, and he didn’t fail to deliver the goods.

He purports to apply a four-step analytical framework to police use-of-force events to determine if the use-of-force in question was consistent with what would be expected of a reasonable police officer acting consistent with national generally accepted police standards.

Interestingly, Stoughton examines this question with zero inquiry into the standards, practices and policies of the actual department of the officer in question. That officer may have followed his own department’s policies to the letter, but if he didn’t meet the national generally accepted police standards as defined by Stoughton, his use of force was unreasonable and worthy of criminal conviction, and perhaps life in prison.

The four-step analytical framework consists of the following components.


In my modest opinion this is not a wildly unreasonable analytical framework for evaluating the reasonableness of an officer’s use-of-force, with the obvious caveat of GIGO.

That is, just as with any algorithm, if you put Garbage In, you get Garbage Out.

And that is, of course, precisely what Professor Stoughton did in this case to arrive at the conclusion the prosecution sought.

This began with Step 1, where he considers the facts and circumstances as would have been viewed by a reasonable officer on the scene.  Remarkably enough, the facts and circumstances most consistent with Floyd being the victim of RACISTPOLICEMURDER were prominent in Stoughton’s inputs to his algorithm.

Conversely, when asked by the defense on cross-examination about facts and circumstances that are incontrovertibly in evidence from other state’s testimony, Stoughton’s memory proved substantially defective and in need of constant refreshing, and the patronizing tone he’d adopted through direct questioning turned on cross-examination into stuttering, ums, uhs, can you repeat the question, and I don’t understand what you’re asking me.

Again, the prosecution returned to old tricks from prior state’s witnesses, even where those old tricks hadn’t worked out for them the first time.  You’ll recall that one prior state witness was presented with three bullet points from the MPD policy manual addressing justified use of force, and that these were presented as the entirety of the use-of-force justification analysis.

To refresh your recollection, those bullets were essentially:


On cross-examination of that prior witness, Nelson had quickly gotten them to concede that while these were indeed three factors to consider in use-of-force decisions, they were representative of the relevant factors to consider, not the entirety of those factors.

Maybe the state thought Nelson would forget how he’d gutted this deception the first time it had come up in this trial?

Well, he hadn’t forgotten, and quickly had Stoughton making the same concession on the witness stand today on cross.

Stoughton also played fast and loose with the concepts of “risk” and “threat.” Specifically, a threat was an active use of force by a suspect, and only that active use of force by the suspect could justify an active use of force by the officer.

A mere prospect of force, however likely it might be based on actual experience and facts, was merely a risk of force, not a threat of force, and a mere risk of force could not justify any degree of force by the officer.

This is, of course, inane on its face, and to make it appear not obviously absurd even Stoughton had to make concessions that gutted the core principle he’d just espoused.

For example, what about passive resisters, people who laid across a street in protest? They are not threatening anybody with imminent harm, so were police prohibited from using any degree of force upon them, even the mere force necessary to carry them from the street.

No, that was OK, said Stoughton, because those people were “threatening force” in some amorphous manner that didn’t actually involve a physical use of force against anyone.

In particular, Stoughton said, once a suspect is handcuffed, he no longer represents any degree of threat to anybody, and therefore the police should be using no force against him whatever. I guess that means once the suspect is cuffed the police are just supposed to ask him to meet them at the police station at his convenience, maybe call him an Uber?

Indeed, Stoughton at one point took all this to truly ridiculous lengths by suggesting that instead of trying to fight Floyd into the back seat of the squad car in attempting his lawful arrest, once he’d made them aware of his anxiety and claustrophobia the officers instead should have offered to allow Floyd to ride in the front seat of the squad car—presumably one of the two officers would take the back seat, behind the barrier, while Floyd rode up front with his partner.

In the real world, of course, the police consider not only active threats against themselves or others, but also the reasonably foreseeable prospects for continued or renewed threats.  A compliant driver pulled over for speeding is rarely subject to any force by the police officer involved—and I would know, I have more than my fair share of speeding tickets (I blame the motorcycle!).

Once a suspect has been physically non-compliant or even violent with an officer, however, a reasonable officer will position himself to be prepared for continuing or renewed non-compliance or violence.  It would be profoundly unreasonable to require officers to treat a just-violent suspect now offering to be compliant the same way they treat a suspect who has been compliant throughout the interaction.

But not according to Professor Stoughton.

As poorly thought out as his analytical approach to police use-of-force might be, however, Professor Stoughton had no doubt whatever about the conclusion it brought him to.

What killed Floyd according to Professor Stoughton? Can you guess?

Sure enough: neck compression and positional asphyxia induced by subdual restraint.

Who’d have guessed it.

Also like every other state witness testifying on these questions, it was very clear that Stoughton had started from the conclusion that Floyd’s death was the result of Chauvin’s use of force—after all, POLICERACISTMURDER!!—and then worked his way back from there to build out a rationale that would, shocking enough, bring him right back to where he started.

Indeed, whereas I’m largely speculating that other state’s witnesses followed this “build your rationale from the conclusion you want” approach, we actually have evidence consistent with that approach in the case of Professor Stoughton.

This came in the form of an op-ed that Stoughton wrote with two others (both co-authors on his latest book) in which they concluded that Floyd’s death was the result of Chauvin’s RACISTPOLICEMURDER!!! neck restraint and positional asphyxia.

How do we know about this Washington Post op-ed? Nelson was kind enough to ask Stoughton about it on cross-examination.

What’s notable about this conclusion was that the op-ed was written in a four-day period between the date of Floyd’s death and when it was published in the Washington Post, and before Stoughton had seen anything other than the bystander video—no medical reports, no autopsy report, no toxicology results, no hours of body cam footage or surveillance camera footage, no 40,000 pages of investigative reports and MPD policy and training materials.

Who needs all that when you already know what happened from the bystander video?

Incidentally, one of the most common and effective means of impeaching the credibility of a purported expert witness is to be able to demonstrate that they approached the question in issue not with an unbiased, impartial and open mind, but instead with having decided the question beforehand.

Which is exactly what Professor Stoughton did in this case.

The state was also eager to use Stoughton’s testimony to undercut the defense narrative that the hostile and threatening mob killed Floyd, or at least substantially contributed to Floyd’s death by complicating the ability of the officers and responding paramedics to do their jobs

Remember, the mob was perceived as sufficiently threatening by the paramedics that they elected to do a “load & scoot” rather than treat Floyd on site—one consequence of which was it took much longer than would otherwise have been the case for the backing fire department responders to meet up with the ambulance they didn’t know had moved three long blocks away.

To do this, Prosecutor Schleiter would show the witness and jury an image of the bystanders on the sidewalk, always as a still photo, typically early in the event when there were only four or five passively watching Floyd’s arrest.  Another photo a few minutes later, again showing only six or seven unobjectionable bystanders filming with their phones.

At no time did Schleiter show video of the angry, shouting mob hurling insults and threats of imminent physical violence, because of course not.

Did the apparently passive observers in the still photos qualify as something that should have distracted the officers from their attention owed to the suspect in their custody. Not if they are reasonable officers, answered Stoughton.

The prosecution also shared images of several selected points in the restraint of Floyd—these were generally not still photos, but close to it—little 10 second clips of different portions of the event, such that an entire context was difficult or impossible to draw.

Was Floyd a threat here? No. Here? No. Here? No.  And because a suspect being a threat, in the odd way threat was defined by Stoughton, was a required element of a finding of justified use-of-force, by Stoughton’s algorithm has applied to the selected facts and conclusions he favored, there was never a point after Floyd was on his knees after fighting himself out of the squad car that the officers had any privilege to use any further force against him whatever.

After all, Stoughton said—and I’m not making this up—Floyd even said “thank you” after fighting his way out of the squad car, so the officers knew that any resistance he’d ever intended to offer them was certainly over now.

The state spent 90 minutes on direct questioning of Stoughton, but it was all of the same tenor as described above, so I’ll leave my detailed commentary at that. Of course, I provided the video of his direct here for your viewing pleasure:

(video)

On cross-examination by Nelson, we suddenly saw the patronizing Stoughton on direct suddenly turn forgetful, stupid, and apparently unable to comprehend simple and direct questions—where he wasn’t, that is, providing answers wildly beyond the scope of the question actually asked.

Mostly, by the way, Nelson allowed Stoughton to run-on in this manner in his answers. Only once or twice did Nelson exercise his privilege to cut off Stoughton’s self-offered additional information by correctly pointing out that it was non-responsive to his actual question.  Every time Nelson did object in this manner, his objection was sustained by Judge Cahill, and you could almost see Stoughton working his mouth as if choking on a chicken bone.

I’m not sure why Nelson didn’t rightfully object more frequently on grounds of non-responsiveness. He seems generally disinclined to raise legitimate objections throughout this trial, passing up many, many opportunities to do so, and indeed objects far less often than does the prosecution (whose objections are most often overruled by Judge Cahill, by the way).

There are possible strategic reasons for adopting this stance on objections.  If Nelson hits a home run while presenting his own (apparently relatively brief) case in chief, then arguably this quiet approach might well have contributed to an acquittal. If not, he’ll look like he passed up a lot of opportunities to object, and did so for no good reason.

I guess time will tell.

There wasn’t much of anything productive to gain from rigorous cross-examination of the suddenly stupid and easily confused Stoughton, so while Nelson touched on the most important points of contention, he didn’t waste energy trying to get argumentative with a clearly hostile state witness—a prudent approach we’ve seen with similar state witnesses earlier in the case.

At one point I thought Nelson was going to turn cross into a ground fight of his own, after Stoughton repeatedly was unable to recall important and well-known facts around the Floyd event, facts caught repeatedly on various body cameras and by other means. You don’t remember this? Nope? You don’t remember that? Nope.

Yet you’ve testified you’ve spent 140 hours of your time reviewing the materials of this case, including the videos, in forming your expert opinion?

Uh, yes.

But Nelson ultimately moved on to the next questions about which Stoughton had only a vague recollection of the facts.

Alternatively, Stoughton claimed an interpretation of events entirely inconsistent with that of probably every other human who has seen the videos.

Do you agree that when Chauvin arrived on scene he immediately observed Lane and Keung struggling with Floyd at the door to their patrol car?

Stoughton: I wouldn’t call that struggling, really.

You’re kidding me.

How about that moment when Floyd was laid prone and immediately kicked his legs out at Lane, prompting the officers to consider going to the hobble restraint?

Stoughton: No, that’s not what I saw, I saw Lane grab Floyd’s legs and straighten and twist them to flip Floyd into the RACISTPOLICEMURDER!!!! prone subdual position.

Of course that’s what you say.

There was a portion of cross-examination here where I felt Nelson really dropped the ball, and it was on the question of proportionality of police use of force.

Nelson proposed that it was reasonable for an officer to use greater force than was being offered by the suspect. Stoughton pushed back on the use of “greater force” as the controlling concept here.  What if the suspect is running in flight, what’s “greater force” in that context?

I found that a fairly effective push-back on the notion of “greater force,” because I also happen to think it’s not a very effective way of framing the issue.

A more productive way of framing the issue is that the officer is allowed to use whatever degree of force is reasonably required to compel compliance, in the non-deadly force context, or to preserve innocent life, in the deadly force context. In both contexts, however, the officer is not permitted to use any more force than necessary to compel compliance or preserve life.

So, to Stoughton’s mocking hypothetical of a fleeing suspect, the force that can be used in the absence of a deadly force threat justifying deadly force by the officer would be whatever non-deadly force would be required to compel compliance (stop the flight), but no more.

That could be a TASER or it could be a full body tackle, or it could be a large fishing net, who cares. But that would be the framework I would apply to that analysis, and I’d have liked it if Nelson had used that framework in his own questioning on this issue.

In the context of Floyd, the officers would have been privileged to use whatever force was required to first, secure Floyd’s compliance with arrest, and second, once it was suspected that Floyd was in genuine medical distress and the EMS call was bumped to code 3, to secure Floyd’s continued presence on site for treatment by paramedics.

There is, of course, more to Nelson’s cross examination here, but I think you get the idea.  Here’s the video of that cross-examination of Stoughton.

(video)

There was also a very, very short re-direct of Stoughton by Schleiter, which you can view here:

(video)

(read more)

"Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives.”

- Étienne de La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

Chauvin Trial Day 11 Wrap-Up + Chauvin Trial Day 12 Wrap-Up
will be posted tomorrow

Chauvin Trial Day 11 Update – State’s Desperate Moves Reveal Vulnerabilities In Prosecution of Chauvin

Prosecutor Schlieter: “Authorized use of force a complete defense to all charges.”

Welcome to our ongoing coverage of the Minnesota murder trial of Derek Chauvin, over the in-custody death of George Floyd.  I am Attorney Andrew Branca for Law of Self Defense.

This is not our end-of-day wrap-up post, folks, that’s still to come later this evening, but there were some interesting arguments made in court before the jury was brought in that I thought worth sharing with you because they appear to indicate that the prosecution is beginning to panic about some profound weaknesses in this case.

The specific arguments I have in mind centered around the state’s upcoming use-of-force expert Professor Seth Stoughton. He’s long been scheduled to testify that based on national standards—not Minneapolis Police Department standards—that in his opinion Chauvin’s use of force was unreasonable.  This testimony was being allowed even though there is no evidence that Chauvin has ever been made aware of standards other than those imposed by Minneapolis Police Department.

Defense Counsel Nelson filed a motion that asked Judge Cahill to exclude Stoughton’s testimony entirely, on the grounds that it is cumulative in nature. That is, in court one is allowed to bring in a witness to argue a legal or factual point in court, but not an unlimited number of witnesses on the same point—to do so risks creating a fundamental unfairness in the proceedings.  So one witness on a given point, OK, two are OK, three or four being to feel sketchy on this issue, seven or eight start to feel over the top.

This has always been a concern of the defense, because the state had a witness list of some 400 people—no, I’m not kidding—most of whose testimony would necessarily be duplicative and cumulative.

Although Nelson raised these concerns with Judge Cahill early on, Stoughton was still permitted to be on the schedule as a use-of-force expert for the state.

Now, however, Nelson is arguing that this allowance should be reversed by the court, because of the manner in which the state has had so many prior witnesses already testify on these use-of-force policy issues.

For example, we’ve heard testimony on these issues from Police Chief Arradondo, from the Inspector in charge of training, from the Lieutenant in charge of training, from Lieutenant Zimmerman who was responding Lieutenant, from Sergeant Ploeger who was the responding sergeant, to the next Sergeant who took over at shift change—and now we’re going to have yet another speaker on the same issues.

The prosecution managed to convince the judge that Stoughton ought to be allowed, despite the cumulative nature of his testimony, because he comes at it from a different perspective than the other witnesses. They were police officers, discussing mostly MPD policies (although a couple did discuss the national case of Graham v. Connor in this context).  In contrast, Stoughton was an academic who would bring a purely national standards perspective.

The manner in which Prosecutor Schleiter framed this argument to Judge Cahill to continue to allow Stoughton’s testimony, however, strongly highlights a key reality in this trial that I raised in this morning’s blog post.

This morning I pointed out that it’s not enough to convict Chauvin on the merits of this case even if his restraint of Floyd was a contributing factor to Floyd’s death. It is also necessary that his use of force upon Floyd was wrongful, meaning not justified, meaning unreasonable under the totality of the circumstances.

In his argument to the judge today, Prosecutor Schleiter explicitly affirmed this challenge for the state, stating:


In other words, the last week’s worth of medical testimony is entirely inadequate to convict Chauvin of any crime, no matter the extent to which it may have contributed to Floyd’s death, if that use of force was that of a reasonable officer under the totality of the circumstances.

And those circumstances include officers’ concerns about excited delirium, awareness that paramedics were arriving imminently, the fact that it had taken four officers to subdue the 6’ 6” 230-pound Floyd as he forcibly fought arrest, and the presence of the hostile crowd shouting threats of imminent physical violence sufficiently believable that even the arriving paramedics chose to do a “load and scoot” rather than attempt to save Floyd’s life on scene, and where members of the crowd were being held back by others from advancing on the officers—including the state’s own MMA “expert” Williams who is visible at the scene wearing a Northside Boxing Club sweatshirt, shouting threats of imminent violence, and with a rather deranged expression on his face (as visible in our featured picture).

If the state can’t overcome that challenge, and do so beyond any reasonable doubt, they cannot gain a conviction on the legal merits of this case.

And that prospect is scaring the heck out of them.

Also of huge concern to the state is the interpretation of Floyd’s in custody statement that (the defense argues) “I ate too much drugs.” The state argues Floyd actually said, “I don’t take no drugs.”

Suddenly, just this past Friday evening, the state prosecutors dumped at Nelson’s office a just-created report by Stoughton that purports to provide some in-depth analysis of Floyd’s speech, including exhibits with slowed down video, subtitles and so forth.

The sudden creation of this report and exhibits tells you exactly how much the “I ate too much drugs” interpretation of Floyd’s words—by THEIR OWN WITNESSES—scared the prosecution.

There was more of interest in this argument over Stoughton, but time doesn’t permit me to dig into all of it. In lieu of that level of detail from me in the moment, here’s the video of the relevant argument, for your viewing pleasure. (read more)

Judge Declines To Sequester Jury In Chauvin Trial Following Shooting, Riots In Minneapolis

Judge Peter Cahill denied a request from the defense to sequester the jury in the trial of Derek Chauvin following a fatal shooting in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and unrest in Minneapolis.

Defense attorney Eric Nelson filed a motion Monday morning to sequester the jury after 20-year-old Daunte Wright was shot and killed Sunday by police during a traffic stop in the suburb of Brooklyn Center, resulting in protests and rioting. When a jury gets sequestered, jurors are isolated to avoid exposure to outside information that could taint their opinions on the case.

Nelson argued that the jury should be sequestered because several of the jurors had connections to Brooklyn Center, including one juror who lives there, Fox 9 News reported. He said that the shooting and the unrest could influence the jury’s decision in the trial. (read more)

Riots and Looting Continue in Minnesota for a Second Night, Following “Accidental” Police Shooting of Black Man

“Rocks and other objects were thrown at the police building, and there were reports that shots were fired in the area”

A young black man named Duante Wright was shot and killed by police in Minnesota this week. He was pulled over for expired tags on his vehicle when police discovered he had an outstanding warrant.

Wright resisted arrest and attempted to escape. A female officer who claims she meant to tase him ended up shooting him instead. Such mistakes, while not common, apparently have happened numerous times in the past:

While not common, instances of police officers accidentally firing a pistol when they meant to draw their Tasers, as the police in a Minneapolis suburb said happened on Sunday when an officer shot and killed Daunte Wright, are not entirely unusual, either….

Ed Obayashi, a California-based expert on the use of force by law enforcement, said that with appropriate training, it should be difficult for officers to confuse a gun with a Taser. “But unfortunately it does happen — this is not the first time and it won’t be the last,” he said, referring to the fatal shooting of Mr. Wright.

In a 2012 article published in the law journal Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, Capt. Greg Meyer, a retired Los Angeles Police Academy instructor, documented nine similar instances between 2001 and 2009.

New footage of the shooting has been released. Caution, this is graphic:

Warning: Graphic footage, including the shooting

Now Minnesota has become the scene of a second round of riots in under a year. The media is back to using the word “protests.” (read more)

18 Reasons I Won't Be Getting a Covid Vaccine

Updated: 8 hours ago

A few friends have asked my thoughts on the covid jab(s) so I thought it was time to write an article on the topic. All my friends had not heard most of the details I shared, so I figured you might appreciate hearing some of what I told them. Knowing how contentious this issue is, part of me would rather just write about something else, but I feel like the discussion/news is so one-sided that I should speak up.

As I always strive to do, I promise to do my best to be level-headed and non-hysterical. I'm not here to pick a fight with anyone, just to walk you through some of what I've read, my lingering questions, and explain why I can't make sense of these covid vaccines.
[...]
I don't know everything, but so far no one has been able to answer the objections below. So here are the reasons I'm opting out of the covid vaccine.

#1: VACCINE MAKERS ARE IMMUNE FROM LIABILITY

The only industry in the world that bears no liability for injuries or deaths resulting from their products, are vaccine makers.

First established in 1986 with the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and reinforced by the PREP Act, vaccine makers cannot be sued, even if they are shown to be negligent.

The covid-vaccine makers are allowed to create a one-size-fits-all product, with no testing on sub-populations (i.e. people with specific health conditions), and yet they are unwilling to accept any responsibility for any adverse events or deaths their products cause.

If a company is not willing to stand behind their product as safe, especially one they rushed to market and skipped animal trials on, I am not willing to take a chance on their product.

No liability. No trust.

Here's why...

#2: THE CHECKERED PAST OF THE VACCINE COMPANIES

The four major companies who are making these covid vaccines are/have either:

Never brought a vaccine to market before covid (Moderna and Johnson & Johnson).

Are serial felons (Pfizer, and Astra Zeneca).

Are both (Johnson & Johnson).

Moderna had been trying to "Modernize our RNA" (thus the company name)--for years, but had never successfully brought ANY product to market--how nice for them to get a major cash infusion from the government to keep trying.

In fact, all major vaccine makers (save Moderna) have paid out tens of billions of dollars in damages for other products they brought to market when they knew those products would cause injuries and death--see Vioxx, Bextra, Celebrex, Thalidomide, and Opioids as a few examples.
[...]
Where else in life would we trust someone with that kind of reputation?

To me that makes as much sense as expecting a remorseless, abusive, unfaithful lover to become a different person because a judge said deep down they are a good person.

No. I don't trust them. No liability. No trust.

Here's another reason why I don't trust them.

#3: THE UGLY HISTORY OF ATTEMPTS TO MAKE CORONAVIRUS VACCINES

There have been many attempts to make viral vaccines in the past that ended in utter failure, which is why we did not have a coronavirus vaccine in 2020.

In the 1960's, scientists attempted to make an RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) vaccine for infants.

In that study, they skipped animal trials because they weren't necessary back then.

In the end, the vaccinated infants got much sicker than the unvaccinated infants when exposed to the virus in nature, with 80% of the vaccinated infants requiring hospitalization, and two of them died.

After 2000, scientists made many attempts to create coronavirus vaccines.

For the past 20 years, all ended in failure because the animals in the clinical trials got very sick and many died, just like the children in the 1960's.
[...]
The problem came when the children and animals were exposed to the wild version of the virus.

When that happened, an unexplained phenomenon called Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) also known as Vaccine Enhanced Disease (VED) occurred where the immune system produced a "cytokine storm" (i.e. overwhelmingly attacked the body), and the children/animals died.

Here's the lingering issue... The vaccine makers have no data to suggest their rushed vaccines have overcome that problem.

In other words, never before has any attempt to make a coronavirus vaccine been successful, nor has the gene-therapy technology that is mRNA "vaccines" been safely brought to market, but hey, since they had billions of dollars in government funding, I'm sure they figured that out.

Except they don't know if they have...

#4: THE "DATA GAPS" SUBMITTED TO THE FDA BY THE VACCINE MAKERS

When vaccine makers submitted their papers to the FDA for the Emergency Use Authorization (Note: An EUA is not the same as a full FDA approval), among the many "Data Gaps" they reported was that they have nothing in their trials to suggest they overcame that pesky problem of Vaccine Enhanced Disease.

They simply don't know--i.e. they have no idea if the vaccines they've made will also produce the same cytokine storm (and deaths) as previous attempts at such products.
[...]
#5: NO ACCESS TO THE RAW DATA FROM THE TRIALS

Would you like to see the raw data that produced the "90% and 95% effective" claims touted in the news?

Me too... But they won't let us see that data.
[...]
#6: NO LONG-TERM SAFETY TESTING

Obviously, with products that have only been on the market a few months, we have no long-term safety data.

In other words, we have no idea what this product will do in the body months or years from now--for ANY population.

Given all the risks above (risks that ALL pharmaceutical products have), would it not be prudent to wait to see if the worst-case scenarios have indeed been avoided?
[...]
#7: NO INFORMED CONSENT

What most who are taking the vaccine don't know is that because these products are still in clinical trials, anyone who gets the shot is now part of the clinical trial.

They are part of the experiment.

Those (like me) who do not take it, are part of the control group.

Time will tell how this experiment works out.
[...]
#8: UNDER-REPORTING OF ADVERSE REACTIONS AND DEATH

According to a study done by Harvard (at the commission of our own government), less than 1% of all adverse reactions to vaccines are actually submitted to the National Vaccine Adverse Events Reports System (VAERS) - read page 6 at the link above.

While the problems with VAERS have not been fixed (as you can read about in this letter to the CDC), at the time of this writing VAERS reports over 2,200 deaths from the current covid vaccines, as well as close to 60,000 adverse reactions.

"VAERS data released today showed 50,861 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines, including 2,249 deaths and 7,726 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and March 26, 2021."
[...]
#9: THE VACCINES DO NOT STOP TRANSMISSION OR INFECTION

Wait, what?

Aren't these vaccines supposed to be what we've been waiting for to "go back to normal"?

Nope.

Why do you think we're getting all these conflicting messages about needing to practice social distancing and wear masks AFTER we get a vaccine?

The reason is because these vaccines were never designed to stop transmission OR infection.
[...]
#10: PEOPLE ARE CATCHING COVID AFTER BEING FULLY VACCINATED

Talk about a bummer.

You get vaccinated and you still catch covid.

    It's happening in Washington State
    It's happening in New York
    It's happening in Michigan
    It's happening in Hawaii
    It's happening in several other states too.
    It happened to 80% of 35 nuns who got the vaccine in Kentucky. Two of them died by the way.
[...]
#11: THE OVERALL DEATH RATE FROM COVID

According to the CDC's own numbers, covid has a 99.74% survival rate.

Why would I take a risk on a product, that doesn't stop infection or transmission, to help me overcome a cold that has a .26% chance of killing me--actually in my age range is has about a .1% chance of killing me (and .01% chance of killing my kids), but let's not split hairs here.

With a bar (death rate) that low, we will be in lockdown every year...i.e. forever.

But wait, what about the 500,000 plus deaths, that's alarming right?

I'm glad you asked.

#12: THE BLOATED COVID DEATH NUMBERS

Something smells really funny about this one.

Never before in the history of death certificates has our own government changed how deaths are reported.

Why now, are we reporting everyone who dies with covid in their body, as having died of covid, rather than the co-morbidities that actually took their life?

Until covid, all coronaviruses (common colds) were never listed as the primary cause of death when someone died of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, auto-immune conditions, or any other major co-morbidity.

The disease was listed as the cause of death, and a confounding factor like flu or pneumonia was listed on a separate line.

To bloat the number even more, both the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. changed their guidelines such that those who are suspected or probable (but were never confirmed) of having died of covid, are also included in the death numbers.

Seriously?
[...]
#13: FAUCI AND SIX OTHERS AT NIAID OWN PATENTS IN THE MODERNA VACCINE

Thanks to the Bayh-Dole Act, government workers are allowed to file patents on any research they do using taxpayer funding.

Tony Fauci owns over 1,000 patents (see this video for more details), including patents being used on the Moderna vaccine...which he approved government funding for.

In fact, the NIH (which NIAID is part of) claims joint ownership of Moderna's vaccine.

Does anyone else see this as a MAJOR conflict of interest, or criminal even?

I say criminal because there's also this pesky problem that makes me even more distrustful of Fauci, NIAD, and the NIH in general.

#14: FAUCI IS ON THE HOT SEAT FOR ILLEGAL GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH

What is "Gain-of-Function" research?

It's where scientists attempt to make viruses gain functions--i.e. make them more transmissible and deadlier.

Sounds at least a touch unethical, right?

How could that possibly be helpful?

Our government agreed, and banned the practice.

So what did the Fauci-led NIAID do?

They pivoted and outsourced the gain-of-function research (in coronaviruses no less) to China--to the tune of a $600K grant.

You can see more details, including the important timeline of these events in this fantastically well-researched documentary.

Mr. Fauci, you have some explaining to do...and I hope the cameras are recording when you have to defend your actions.

For now, let's turn our attention back to the virus...

#15: THE VIRUS CONTINUES TO MUTATE

Not only does the virus (like all viruses) continue to mutate, but according to world-renowned vaccine developer Geert Vanden Bossche (who you'll meet below if you don't know him) it's mutating about every 10 hours.

How in the world are we going to keep creating vaccines to keep up with that level of mutation?

We're not.

Might that also explain why fully vaccinated people are continuing to catch covid?

Why, given that natural immunity has never ultimately failed humanity, do we suddenly not trust it?

Why, if I ask questions like the above, or post links like what you find above, will my thoughts be deleted from all major social media platforms?

That brings me to the next troubling problem I have with these vaccines.

#16: CENSORSHIP...AND THE COMPLETE ABSENCE OF SCIENTIFIC DEBATE

I can't help but get snarky here, so humor me.

How did you enjoy all those nationally and globally-televised, robust debates put on by public health officials, and broadcast simultaneously on every major news station?

Wasn't it great hearing from the best minds in medicine, virology, epidemiology, economics, and vaccinology from all over the world as they vigorously and respectfully debated things like:

    Lockdowns
    Mask wearing
    Social-distancing
    Vaccine efficacy and safety trials
    How to screen for susceptibility to vaccine injury
    Therapeutics, (i.e. non-vaccine treatment options)

Wasn't it great seeing public health officials (who never treated anyone with covid) have their "science" questioned?

Wasn't it great seeing the FDA panel publicly grill the vaccine makers in prime time as they stood in the hot-seat of tough questions about products of which they have no liability?

Oh, wait...you didn't see those debates?

No, you didn't...because they never happened.

What happened instead was heavy-handed censorship of all but one narrative.

Ironically, Mark Zuckerberg can question vaccine safety, but I can't?

Hypocrite?

When did the first amendment become a suggestion?

It's the FIRST amendment Mark--the one our founders thought was most important.

With so much at stake, why are we fed only one narrative...shouldn't many perspectives be heard and professionally debated?

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO SCIENCE?

What has happened to the scientific method of always challenging our assumptions?

What happened to lively debate in this country, or at least in Western society?

Why did anyone who disagrees with the WHO, or the CDC get censored so heavily?

Is the science of public health a religion now, or is science supposed to be about debate?

If someone says "the science is settled" that's how I know I'm dealing with someone who is closed minded.

By definition science (especially biological science) is never settled.

If it was, it would be dogma, not science.
[...]
#17: THE WORLD'S LEADING VACCINOLOGIST IS SOUNDING THE ALARM...

Here is what may be the biggest reason this covid vaccine doesn't make sense to me.

When someone who is very pro-vaccine, who has spent his entire professional career overseeing the development of vaccines, is shouting from the mountaintops that we have a major problem, I think the man should be heard.

In case you missed it, and in case you care to watch it, here is Geert Vanden Bossche, explaining:

Why the covid vaccine may be putting so much pressure on the virus that we are accelerating it's ability to mutate and become more deadly.

Why the covid vaccines may be creating vaccine-resistant viruses (similar to anti-biotic resistant bacteria).

Why, because of previous problems with Antibody Dependent Enhancement, we may be looking at a mass casualty event in the next few months/years.
[...]
#18: I ALREADY HAD COVID

I didn't enjoy it. It was a nasty cold for two days:     Unrelenting butt/low-back aches
    Very low energy.
    Low-grade fever.

It was weird not being able to smell anything for a couple days. A week later, coffee still tasted a little "off." But I survived.

Now it appears (as it always has) that I have beautiful, natural, life-long immunity...
...not something likely to wear off in a few months if I get the vaccine.

In my body, and my household, covid is over.

In fact, now that I've had it, there is evidence the covid vaccine might actually be more dangerous for me. That is not a risk I'm willing to take.(read more)

Twitter BANS black reporter for criticizing BLM founder for buying $1.4m home in '88% white LA neighborhood' - as he slams big tech for making the movement a 'sacred cow despite its financial GRIFT'

•Patrisse Cullors, 37, has bought an expansive property in Topanga Canyon
•The district in which the BLM founder will now live is 88% white and 1.8% black
•Critics accused her of abandoning her social justice and activist roots
•Sports journalist Jason Whitlock was among those remarking on her purchase
•Twitter on Friday locked him out of his account in response to his tweet
•Whitlock told DailyMail.com he remains blocked by the social media network
•Twitter is demanding he delete his tweet linking to a celebrity real estate blog
•Whitlock says he remains 'in Twitter jail, because I won't post bail'
•The action is the latest draconian step in censorship by the Silicon Valley firm

A prominent black sports journalist barred from Twitter for the 'crime' of discussing the $1.4 million house bought by a [Only] Black Lives Matter co-founder slammed the company for trying to silence legitimate debate.

Jason Whitlock, 53, told DailyMail.com on Monday that Twitter was 'going too far' by blocking him from posting to his account, which has nearly 450,000 followers.

The censorship by Twitter comes as social media companies, including Twitter and Facebook, have increasingly 'de-platformed' figures who stray too far from opinions they consider acceptable.

'BLM is one of Big Tech's sacred cows,' Whitlock told DailyMail.com 'I’ve been harping on the fraudulence and the financial grift of BLM for years.'

'I think Twitter has been looking for an excuse to de-platform me,' he said.

BLM raised $90 million last year, the AP has reported, but it's unclear how leaders are paid - if they are paid - because the organization's finances are opaque, a fact that has sparked criticism, even among local BLM chapters.

Now, Whitlock says, Twitter is trying to silence him for asking questions about BLM's finances.

He was silenced just as it emerged that BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors, a self-professed 'trained Marxist', had purchased the $1.4 million house in LA. The New York Post reported Cullors had also bought two other LA homes in recent years, and paid $415,000 for a 3.2 acre property in Georgia.

When Whitlock tweeted his response to the news of Cullors's purchase, he included a link to the popular celebrity real estate website The Dirt, which first reported the details of the property.

Cullors, 37, raised eyebrows with her new three bedroom, three bathroom house in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles - a largely white district.

In her new zip code, 88 per cent of residents are white and 1.8 per cent black, according to the census. 

Whitlock explained: 'Twitter locked my account around 4pm Friday,' confirming his account was still blocked.

'They said my account was locked because I revealed personal information about someone. 

'They said I needed to remove the tweet that linked the dirt.com story about Cullors buying a house in Topanga.'

There was no explanation of how linking to the Dirt.com story revealed personal information as neither the story, nor Whitlock's tweet, listed an address - and the purchase also was discussed widely elsewhere on Twitter and reported throughout the press.

Twitter didn't respond to DailyMail.com's request for comment. (read more)

The Talk

Sit down and read this.

Do you have any idea what you are doing? Do you even care?

If my late grandfather could see the latest headlines, he would put on this grimace, shout, "They are not a credit to their race," then whisper, "They are not a credit to their race." He would throw open the front door, slam it shut, then take a long walk. I can see him now - vividly. He did the exact same thing so many times. It was his routine whenever he learned that a black man had let down the rest of us.

He needed those long walks to settle down because he had a long view of race relations in America.

He grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and hitchhiked to Ohio when he was 17.

He worked hard and did well, well enough that he and my grandmother raised me and my sister.

I'd probably be dead if grandpa had not beaten sense (literally and figuratively) into me. I'm not exaggerating.

I learned from him that no one owed me anything. I learned from him that gratitude is a very important trait. I learned from him that all work is noble, no matter how menial. He and grandma taught me to love God and His only begotten Son. That was the greatest thing they taught me.

Anyone telling you that America is a racist nation or that systemic racism is holding you back is full of bullshit. I have met exactly 3 white racists in all my life (that's 1 for every 15 years). However, I have met several dozen black racists and Jew-haters. Several of those black anti-Semites could out-Hitler Hitler. I kid you not.

There are saints and sinners in every race. All of us have a little of each. Some of us have alot of one or the other. You have to have enough sense to stay away from the sinners and spend more time with the saints.

Stay away from "friends" who drink or use drugs. Stay away from boys who call girls, "bitches." Don't be calling each other, "nigger" or "niggah." Don't listen to "music" that uses those words.

Those are easy things to do. The hard ones include forgiving and loving those who have wronged you, along with delaying sex until you are married.

The hardest thing most of you can do is to totally disengage from the culture of the projects and the ghettos and the "blame whitey" mentality.

Also, free yourself from the welfare plantation. It was set up to ruin us blacks. Welfare denied black boys and girls their fathers and their paternal influence. Welfare encouraged and subsidized black girls to turn into sows, getting pregnant and pushing out babies to grow up to become addicts or criminals or both.

Police kill many more whites than blacks. It's true. Look it up. You don't see whites looting and rioting every time a white boy is shot dead. Do you? Then why the Hell are you doing that when a black (usually a criminal) is killed by police? Is that your black privilege?

Black criminality marks all blacks. It leaves a stain that causes whites to be wary of us. They're not racists, they just want to be safe. They read the papers, they know who is committing crimes.

They know two black girls killed an Uber Eats driver in DC. That scares whites. It scares me as well.

Black criminality also taints my two boys. They are innocent, but have to continually prove their innocence before all the whites they meet. They study hard and my older one wants to be the next Clarence Thomas (no kidding). Blacks behaving badly puts a bullseye on the backs of my precious boys. How dare you endanger them by your actions. How dare you prove to whites, day in and day out, that the crime statistics are true. How dare you participate in this unholy war that is tearing apart America.

I could say more but I have a job to do and a family to support.

Trump You

Just a quick message from the Patriots to the Progressives...
 
* For those who said last summer's deadly, violent, and felonious actions in our cities were "mostly nonviolent" exercises of free speech and democracy and at the same time called January 6 an insurrection by extremists who committed treason and sedition...Trump you.

* For those that think we will allow for Biden and the Progressives to cancel God, cancel  Sunday morning worship, and legislate the Bible as hate speech...Trump you.

* For those that think we will allow Progressive government to deny Second Amendment rights, create a shortage of ammo, make hunting rifles illegal, and take guns away from Trump states while allowing them to remain in Progressive cities...Trump you.
 
* For those who thought it unconstitutional and unseemly to put military troops on our borders to prevent illegal immigration during the last four years but somehow believe it's noble to use the military to protect, house, and transport these illegal aliens on military bases...Trump you.

* To Major League Baseball, whose managers think it's somehow wrong to write legislation to protect voter integrity, to make sure elections aren't stolen, and to make sure Americans trust in the results of our national elections, and thus moved the All-Star Game out of Atlanta while the commissioner of MLB keeps his membership at The Masters — and by the way, it appears MLB is in negotiations for billions in revenue with the communist Chinese government (who puts its own people in internment camps)...Trump you.

* To the NBA that has gone all "woke" on systematic racism and social justice, while at the same time the officials and players have billion-dollar deals with the Chinese government (who has made slaves of its own people)...Trump you.
 
* To the Progressive media that lied, deceived, and created faux news against President Trump for six years, but now continuously covers up, ignores, and cancels negative news about the Biden administration...Trump you.

* For those in the Progressive media who never gave the Trump family a moment of peace and continually lied about the Trump family, and who are now covering up the multitude of reported felonies committed by Hunter Biden...Trump you.

* To those in the Progressive media who lied for years about President Trump being a spy, dupe, and puppet of the Russian Putin government but now totally ignore the probable blackmail information that the Chinese government has on Biden, Hunter, and the Biden family...Trump you.

* To CNN, which has lied, deceived, and created faux narratives about Florida's governor DeSantis but continues to block for and propagandize false positive information about New York's Cuomo and California's Newsom...Trump you.

* To Nancy Pelosi, who thought it unconstitutional to use our military to put down the murderous insurrections last summer by the likes of Antifa and BLM but now still to this day uses the military to surround the People's House — the Capitol Building — for her own protection and convenience...Trump you.

* To the folks who wear "My Body My Choice" shirts in their support of abortions at any time, any place, and during any part of the pregnancy but mock and ridicule people who say  "My Body My Choice" when it comes to them refusing the COVID vaccine...Trump you.

* To the American Civil Liberties Union, who in our history stood up for free speech, open expression, and varied opinions and discourse (especially where it's controversial), but now the ACLU says nothing, absolutely nothing when it comes to our cancel culture, our burning books, muted free speech, destroyed careers, and our indoctrination of politically correct Orwellian speech...a big Trump you.  You guys in the ACLU should know better, and you have failed wickedly.

* To the "woke" community that now says wanting a "colorblind" society and that somehow quoting the exact words from Dr Martin Luther King is now racist...Trump you.

* To the Progressives who want to raise taxes on red-state citizens to make up revenue to cover the failures and waste of blue-state leadership...Trump you.

* To the globalists who believe that it is simultaneously possible for America to be a welfare state and a borderless nation that survives (which has never happened in human history, ever)...Trump you.

* To the FBI/CIA/NSA leadership in D.C. that proved the last four years that you are no longer neutral, you are a part of the Deep State, and we can no longer fully trust you...Trump you.  What leadership in the agencies are now doing would make J. Edgar Hoover blush.

* To the leadership of the U.S. military establishment in D.C. — not the soldiers, but the political class in leadership — who did not support your commander in chief and undercut and sabotaged his efforts every chance you got the last four years...Trump you.

* To the U.S. Supreme Court who refused to hear any and all legitimate evidence with regard to obvious voter fraud, voter integrity, and voter abnormalities of the 2020 election, because of cowardness or crookedness or compromising behavior...Trump you.

* To the political leadership of our cities that told our police officers to "stand down" while our cities burned, people were killed, and voters were intimidated, much like Kristallnacht in Germany of the early 1930s...Trump you.

* To the Big Tech oligarchs who have made billions of dollars off the American people and American working class and now censure the populists' opinions, points of view, and speech without a moments thought of the Constitution...Trump you.

* To the university presidents that are now allowing for race-based dorms, classes, fraternities, and even race-based graduation ceremonies...Trump you.

* To Fauci and the rest of the Deep State experts who have given President Trump no credit and no accolades for "Operation Warp Speed" in getting the China virus vaccine created in record time...Trump you.

* To the RINO leadership of politicians, consultants, and Deep State turncoats, we will never go back to the Romneys and McCains.  Trump you.

* And finally, to the Progressives who think we are going to allow you to steal, cheat,  and bully your way into winning the off-year elections of 2022 and the presidential election of 2024...never again, and Trump you.
(read more)

The high school girls continue to be in charge of the military

Let me start by admitting that I am very sexist in that I, a woman, feel that the U.S. military has become way too feminine. Whether it’s troops running around in high heels to “walk a mile in her shoes,” drag queens, inordinately high numbers of pregnancies, or seriously reducing physical standards because women cannot meet the existing standards, the military is losing its ability to carry out its number one job: Killing the enemy. It turns out that, at least to my way of thinking, the military is becoming feminized in another way, too: In its public relations, it’s clear that the high school girls have taken over.
 
I first noticed this high school girl trend in mid-March after Tucker Carlson exposed how quickly the Biden administration was moving to weaken the military in a host of ways. The response from the military was extraordinary. Forgetting its obligation to be above the political fray and to preserve its fire for actual shooting enemies, such as (God forbid, it should come to that) the Iranians or the Chinese, the military turned its guns on Carlson.

That wasn’t even the worst part. Instead, the worst part is that it was apparent that a bunch of 16-year-old mean girls were controlling the social media accounts for the various branches of the American military – and not just at the enlisted level, but at the officer level as well. (Regarding that problem, a lot of the blame goes back to Obama’s White House, which seeded the officer class with leftists.)

While the mean girls may have been sent to the back of the classroom, those 16-year-olds girls are still driving the military train. How else can one explain the fact that the U.S. Navy put a cutesy little blue mask on its eagle logo?




That’s what girls do. They put makeup on their dogs, love Hello Kitty, and are generally into cute things and dress-up.

This is not a serious military. Our enemies fully understand this. Others do as well, responding with a combination of disgust, humor, and fear as the comments to John Cardillo’s post reveal. (You can see the best comments at Twitchy.)

However, maybe there is some good news in all of this. Given that some serious people believe that Biden’s United States Military has is preparing to turn American states and citizens into its next target, perhaps we should be thanking our lucky stars for lowered standards and immature mental processes. (read more)

"A gun is no more dangerous than a cricket bat in the hands of a madman."
– Prince Philip
 
"When a man opens a car door for his wife, it’s either a new car or a new wife."
– Prince Philip
 
"If you gave a seven-year-old a brush and paints he'd produce something like that."
- Prince Philip in the Sudan, after viewing some of the paintings housed in the country's ethnic museum.

"You look as if you're dressed for bed."
- Prince Philip to a Nigerian dignitary wearing traditional robes.

"it's so nice to be in a country that isn't run by its people!"
– Prince Philip to the be-medalled leader of some Latin American junta.

The Duke of Edinburgh was notorious for his derogatory comments about people and places

Prince Philip, who has died at the age of 99, will be remembered not only as the longest-serving consort but perhaps also as the most gaffe-prone one.

His much-publicised errors, which endeared him to some but were also capable of causing great offence, included derogatory remarks about people and places, and rude quips he made when angry.

One of his most notorious jokes came around 30 years ago, when he is alleged to have told the German media: “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.”

The comment returned to prominence last year at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Here are 90 gaffes the Duke of Edinburgh made during his nine decades on the planet, compiled by The Independent.

1. "Ghastly." Prince Philip's opinion of Beijing, during a 1986 tour of China.

2. "Ghastly." Prince Philip's opinion of Stoke-on-Trent, as offered to the city's Labour MP Joan Walley at Buckingham Palace in 1997.

3. "Deaf? If you're near there, no wonder you are deaf." Said to a group of deaf children standing near a Caribbean steel drum band in 2000.

4. "If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes." To 21-year-old British student Simon Kerby during a visit to China in 1986.

5. "You managed not to get eaten then?" To a British student who had trekked in Papua New Guinea, during an official visit in 1998.

6. "You can't have been here that long – you haven't got a pot belly." To a British tourist during a tour of Budapest in Hungary. 1993.

7. "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?" Asked of a Scottish driving instructor in 1995.

8. "Damn fool question!" To BBC journalist Caroline Wyatt at a banquet at the Elysée Palace after she asked Queen Elizabeth if she was enjoying her stay in Paris in 2006.

9. "It looks as though it was put in by an Indian." The Prince's verdict of a fuse box during a tour of a Scottish factory in August 1999. He later clarified his comment: "I meant to say cowboys. "I just got my cowboys and Indians mixed up."

10. "People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still drying out Windsor Castle." To survivors of the Lockerbie Pan-Am disaster in 1993.

11. "We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves." During a trip to Canada in 1976.

12. "A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure, everyone's working too much. Now that everybody's got more leisure time they are complaining they are unemployed. People don't seem to make up their minds what they want." A man of the people shares insight into the recession that gripped Britain in 1981.

13. "British women can't cook." Winning the hearts of the Scottish Women's Institute in 1961.

14. "It was part of the fortunes of war. We didn't have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking 'Are you all right - are you sure you don't have a ghastly problem?' You just got on with it!" On the issue of stress counselling for servicemen in a TV documentary marking the 50th Anniversary of V-J Day in 1995.

15. "What do you gargle with – pebbles?" To Tom Jones, after the Royal Variety Performance, 1969. He added the following day: "It is very difficult at all to see how it is possible to become immensely valuable by singing what I think are the most hideous songs."

16. "It's a vast waste of space." Philip entertained guests in 2000 at the reception of a new £18m British Embassy in Berlin, which the Queen had just opened.

17. "There's a lot of your family in tonight." After glancing at business chief Atul Patel's name badge during a 2009 Buckingham Palace reception for 400 influential British Indians to meet the Royal couple.

18. "If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." Said to a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986.

19. "You ARE a woman, aren't you?" To a woman in Kenya in 1984, after accepting a gift.

20. "Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?" To a wheelchair-bound Susan Edwards, and her guide dog Natalie in 2002.

21. "Get me a beer. I don't care what kind it is, just get me a beer!" On being offered the finest Italian wines by PM Giuliano Amato at a dinner in Rome in 2000.

22. "I would like to go to Russia very much – although the bastards murdered half my family." In 1967, asked if he would like to visit the Soviet Union.

23. "If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?" In a Radio 4 interview shortly after the Dunblane shootings in 1996. He said to the interviewer off-air afterwards: "That will really set the cat among the pigeons, won't it?"

24. "Oh, it's you that owns that ghastly car is it? We often see it when driving to Windsor Castle." To neighbour Elton John after hearing he had sold his Watford FC-themed Aston Martin in 2001.

25. "The problem with London is the tourists. They cause the congestion. If we could just stop the tourism, we could stop the congestion." At the opening of City Hall in 2002.

26. "A pissometer?" The Prince sees the renames the piezometer water gauge demonstrated by Australian farmer Steve Filelti in 2000.

27. "Don't feed your rabbits pawpaw fruit – it acts as a contraceptive. Then again, it might not work on rabbits." Giving advice to a Caribbean rabbit breeder in Anguilla in 1994.

28. "You must be out of your minds." To Solomon Islanders, on being told that their population growth was 5 per cent a year, in 1982.

29. "Young people are the same as they always were. They are just as ignorant." At the 50th anniversary of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme.

30. "Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species." Accepting a conservation award in Thailand in 1991.

31. "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" In the Cayman Islands, 1994.

32. "You bloody silly fool!" To an elderly car park attendant who made the mistake of not recognising him at Cambridge University in 1997.

33. "Oh! You are the people ruining the rivers and the environment." To three young employees of a Scottish fish farm at Holyrood Palace in 1999.

34. "If you travel as much as we do you appreciate the improvements in aircraft design of less noise and more comfort – provided you don't travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly." To the Aircraft Research Association in 2002.

35. "The French don't know how to cook breakfast." After a breakfast of bacon, eggs, smoked salmon, kedgeree, croissants and pain au chocolat – from Gallic chef Regis Crépy – in 2002.

36. "And what exotic part of the world do you come from?" Asked in 1999 of Tory politician Lord Taylor of Warwick, whose parents are Jamaican. He replied: "Birmingham."

37. "Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease." On a visit to Australia in 1992, when asked if he wanted to stroke a koala bear.

38. "It doesn't look like much work goes on at this University." Overheard at Bristol University's engineering facility. It had been closed so that he and the Queen could officially open it in 2005.

39. "I wish he'd turn the microphone off!" The Prince expresses his opinion of Elton John's performance at the 73rd Royal Variety Show, 2001.

40. "Do you still throw spears at each other?" Prince Philip shocks Aboriginal leader William Brin at the Aboriginal Cultural Park in Queensland, 2002.

41. "Where's the Southern Comfort?" On being presented with a hamper of southern goods by the American ambassador in London in 1999.

42. "Were you here in the bad old days? ... That's why you can't read and write then!" To parents during a visit to Fir Vale Comprehensive School in Sheffield, which had suffered poor academic reputation.

43. "Ah you're the one who wrote the letter. So you can write then? Ha, ha! Well done." Meeting 14-year old George Barlow, whose invited to the Queen to visit Romford, Essex, in 2003.

44. "So who's on drugs here?... HE looks as if he's on drugs." To a 14-year-old member of a Bangladeshi youth club in 2002.

45. "You could do with losing a little bit of weight." To hopeful astronaut, 13-year-old Andrew Adams.

46. "You have mosquitoes. I have the Press." To the matron of a hospital in the Caribbean in 1966.

47. "The man who invented the red carpet needed his head examined." While hosts made effort to greet a state visit to Brazil, 1968.

48. "During the Blitz a lot of shops had their windows blown in and sometimes they put up notices saying, 'More open than usual.' I now declare this place more open than usual." Unveiling a plaque at the University of Hertfordshire's new Hatfield campus in November 2003.

49 . Philip: "Who are you?"


50. "No, I would probably end up spitting it out over everybody." Prince Philip declines the offer of some fish from Rick Stein's seafood deli in 2000.

51. "Any bloody fool can lay a wreath at the thingamy." Discussing his role in an interview with Jeremy Paxman.

52. "Holidays are curious things, aren't they? You send children to school to get them out of your hair. Then they come back and make life difficult for parents. That is why holidays are set so they are just about the limit of your endurance." At the opening of a school in 2000.

53. "People think there's a rigid class system here, but dukes have even been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans." In 2000.

54. "Can you tell the difference between them?" On being told by President Obama that he'd had breakfast with the leaders of the UK, China and Russia.

55. "I don't know how they are going to integrate in places like Glasgow and Sheffield." After meeting students from Brunei coming to Britain to study in 1998.

56. "Do people trip over you?" Meeting a wheelchair-bound nursing-home resident in 2002.

57. "That's a nice tie... Do you have any knickers in that material?" Discussing the tartan designed for the Papal visit with then-Scottish Tory leader Annabel Goldie last year.

58. "I have never been noticeably reticent about talking on subjects about which I know nothing." Addressing a group of industrialists in 1961.

59. "It's not a very big one, but at least it's dead and it took an awful lot of killing!" Speaking about a crocodile he shot in Gambia in 1957.

60. "Well, you didn't design your beard too well, did you? You really must try better with your beard." To a young fashion designer at a Buckingham Palace in 2009.

61. "So you're responsible for the kind of crap Channel Four produces!" Speaking to then chairman of the channel, Michael Bishop, in 1962.

62. "Dontopedalogy is the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it, a science which I have practiced for a good many years." Address to the General Dental Council, quoted in Time in 1960.

63. "Tolerance is the one essential ingredient... You can take it from me that the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance." Advice for a successful marriage in 1997.

64. "I never see any home cooking – all I get is fancy stuff." Commiserating about the standard of Buckingham Palace cuisine in 1962.

65. "I suppose I would get in a lot of trouble if I were to melt them down." On being shown Nottingham Forest FC's trophy collection in 1999.

66. "It makes you all look like Dracula's daughters!" To pupils at Queen Anne's School in Reading, who wear blood-red uniforms, in 1998.

67. "I don't think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing." Dismissing claims that those who sell slaughtered meat have greater moral authority than those who participate in blood sports, in 1988.

68. "Ah, so this is feminist corner then." Joining a group of female Labour MPs, who were wearing name badges reading "Ms", at a Buckingham Palace drinks party in 2000.

69. "Cats kill far more birds than men. Why don't you have a slogan: 'Kill a cat and save a bird?'" On being told of a project to protect turtle doves in Anguilla in 1965.

70. "All money nowadays seems to be produced with a natural homing instinct for the Treasury." Bemoaning the rate of British tax in 1963.

71. "It is my invariable custom to say something flattering to begin with so that I shall be excused if by any chance I put my foot in it later on." Full marks for honesty, from a speech in 1956.

72. "Why don't you go and live in a hostel to save cash?" Asked of a penniless student.

73. "In education, if in nothing else, the Scotsman knows what is best for him. Indeed, only a Scotsman can really survive a Scottish education." Said when he was made Chancellor of Edinburgh University in November 1953.

74. "If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she isn't interested." Of his daughter, Princess Anne.

75. "They're not mating are they?" Spotting two robots bumping in to one another at the Science Museum in 2000.

76. "I must be in the only person in Britain glad to see the back of that plane." Philip did not approve of the noise Concorde made while flying over the Buckingham Palace.

77. "The only active sport, which I follow, is polo – and most of the work's done by the pony!" 1965

78. "It looks like a tart's bedroom." On seeing plans for the Duke and then Duchess of York's house at Sunninghill Park.

79. "Reichskanzler." Prince Philip used Hitler's title to address German chancellor Helmut Kohl during a speech in Hanover in 1997.

80. "We go into the red next year... I shall probably have to give up polo." Comment on US television in 1969 about the Royal Family's finances.

81. "Bugger the table plan, give me my dinner!" Showing his impatience to be fed at a dinner party in 2004.

82. "I thought it was against the law these days for a woman to solicit." Said to a woman solicitor.

83. "You're just a silly little Whitehall twit: you don't trust me and I don't trust you." Said to Sir Rennie Maudslay, Keeper of the Privy Purse, in the 1970s.

84. "What about Tom Jones? He's made a million and he's a bloody awful singer." Response to a comment at a small-business lunch about how difficult it is in Britain to get rich.

85. "This could only happen in a technical college." On getting stuck in a lift between two floors at the Heriot Watt University, 1958.

86. "I'd much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly." When asked what he felt about his life in 1992.

87. "It looks like the kind of thing my daughter would bring back from her school art lessons" On being shown "primitive" Ethiopian art in 1965.

88. "You're not wearing mink knickers, are you?" Philip charms fashion writer Serena French at a World Wildlife Fund gathering in 1993.

89. "My son...er...owns them." On being asked on a Canadian tour whether he knew the Scilly Isles.

90. "Well, that's more than you know about anything else then." Speaking, a touch condescendingly, to Michael Buerk, after being told by the BBC newsreader that he did know about the Duke of Edinburgh's Gold Awards in 2004.
(read more)

It is Illegal to Discriminate against Non-Vaccinated People
 
A lot of emails are coming in over suing universities and schools. Let me further explain, it is illegal under both federal and state laws to discriminate against an employee based on his or her medical condition with regard to employment decisions. These decisions include hiring, firing, promoting, demoting, training, and job assignments. Federal laws that protect against medical condition discrimination are the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Certainly, any company that demands an employee be vaccinated to get a job should be sued for what they are demanding is outright illegal. That same can be applied to schools. (read more)

It has been brought to our attention (again) that certain pussies, wusses and bedwetters associated with usaa.com do not like our content on usaapay.com.

IF YOU FIND OUR CONTENT SO PROBLEMATIC, DELETE THE BROWSER BOOKMARK AND STOP VISITING OUR SITE.

Is that so difficult?

Stop torturing your fragile personality and continue taking your anxiety medications.

Our primary demographic is Americans who love their country unapologetically.

Many active and retired members of the armed forces love this sort of content. They are our kind of people.

Those who chose to be offended by our content tell us all we need to know about their loyalties and spinelessness.

“Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

- Samuel Adams

[ADL] Response To Common Inaccuracy: Bi-National/One-State Solution

[…] The proposal of a bi-national state, or a “one-state solution,” is nothing less than an indirect attempt to bring about an end to the State of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.

[…] A bi-national state, in principle and in practice, would mean the ideological end of the Jewish State of Israel and lead to the forsaking of Jewish nationalism and identity, along with its special status as a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution.

Furthermore, bi-nationalism is unworkable given current realities and historic animosities. With historically high birth rates among the Palestinians, and a possible influx of Palestinian refugees and their descendants now living around the world, Jews would quickly be a minority within a bi-national state, thus likely ending any semblance of equal representation and protections. In this situation, the Jewish population would be increasingly politically – and potentially physically – vulnerable.

It is unrealistic and unacceptable to expect the State of Israel to voluntarily subvert its own sovereign existence and nationalist identity and become a vulnerable minority within what was once its own territory. (read more)

[...] The Long History of Jewish Efforts to Replace the White population of America

The lack of concern on the part of [Max} Boot and [Jonathan] Greenblatt for White Americans is entirely typical of the organized Jewish community. The following is based on Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique along with some more recent research—the point being that the organized Jewish community has long had the aim of diluting the White population of the U.S., motivated by fear and loathing of the White population. The culture of critique is the erection of an adversarial culture that is hostile to the traditional White population of the U.S.

Jewish activists on immigration rejected the ethnic status quo put in place by the 1924 and 1952 immigration laws. Otis Graham (2004: 80) notes that the Jewish lobby on immigration was not only the most effective force in enacting the 1965 law, their activism “was aimed not just at open doors for Jews, but also for a diversification of the immigration stream sufficient to eliminate the majority status of western European so that a fascist regime in America would be more unlikely.” The motivating role of fear and insecurity on the part of the activist Jewish community Jews thus differed from other groups and individuals promoting an end to the national origins provisions of the 1924 and 1952 laws.

Stuar Svonkin ( 1997, 8ff) shows that a sense of “uneasiness” and insecurity pervaded American Jewry in the wake of World War II even in the face of evidence that anti-Semitism had declined to the point that it had become a marginal phenomenon. As a direct result, “The primary objective of the Jewish intergroup relations agencies [i.e., the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the ADL] after 1945 was . . . to prevent the emergence of an anti-Semitic reactionary mass movement in the United States” (Svonkin 1997, 8).

Writing in the 1970s, Isaacs (1974: 14ff) describes the pervasive insecurity of American Jews and their hypersensitivity to anything that might be deemed anti-Semitic. Interviewing “noted public men” on the subject of anti-Semitism in the early 1970s, Isaacs asked, “Do you think it could happen here?” “Never was it necessary to define ‘it.’ In almost every case, the reply was approximately the same: ‘If you know history at all, you have to presume not that it could happen, but that it probably will,’ or ‘It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when.’ ” (p. 15).

Writing long after the passage of the 1965 law, prominent Jewish social scientist and ethnic activist Earl Raab remarked very positively on the success of American immigration policy in altering the ethnic composition of the United States. Writing for a Jewish publication, Raab noted that the Jewish community had taken a leadership role in changing the northwestern European bias of American immigration policy (Raab, 1993a, 17), and he also maintained that one factor inhibiting anti-Semitism in the contemporary United States is that “an increasing ethnic heterogeneity, as a result of immigration, has made it even more difficult for a political party or mass movement of bigotry to develop” (Raab, 1995b, 91). Similarly, Elliott Abrams (1999, 190) noted, “the American Jewish community clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.”

In 1952 President Truman’s President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization (PCIN) pointedly noted that the 1924 legislation had succeeded in maintaining the racial status quo, and that the main barrier to changing the racial status quo was not the national origins system, because there were already high levels of nonquota immigrants and because the countries of Northern and Western Europe did not fill their quotas. Rather, the report noted that the main barrier to changing the racial status quo was the total number of immigrants.


The chairman of the PCIN was Philip B. Perlman, and the staff of the commission contained a high percentage of Jews, headed by Harry N. Rosenfield (Executive Director) and Elliot Shirk (Assistant to the Executive Director); its report was wholeheartedly endorsed by the AJCongress (see Congress Weekly, Jan. 12, 1952: 3). The proceedings were printed as the report Whom We Shall Welcome (PCIN, 1953) with the cooperation of Rep. Emanuel Celler and with an essay by Oscar Handlin, the Jewish academic activist (see below).

The American Jewish Congress, the largest American Jewish organization at the time, testified during the Senate hearings on the 1952 law that the 1924 legislation had succeeded in preserving the ethnic balance of the United States, but it commented that “the objective is valueless. There is nothing sacrosanct about the composition of the population in 1920. It would be foolish to believe that we reached the peak of ethnic perfection in that year.”[1]

During this period the Congress Weekly, the newsletter of the AJCongress, regularly denounced the national origins provisions as based on the “myth of the existence of superior and inferior racial stocks” (Oct. 17, 1955: 3) and advocated immigration on the basis of “need and other criteria unrelated to race or national origin” (May 4, 1953: 3). Dr. Israel Goldstein (1952a, 6), president of the AJCongress, wrote that “The national origins formula “is outrageous now . . . when our national experience has confirmed beyond a doubt that our very strength lies in the diversity of our peoples” (Goldstein 1952b, 5), thus presaging the current mantra promulgated by American media and politicians that “Diversity is our greatest strength.”

Prominent Jewish intellectuals, such as Harvard historian and public intellectual Oscar Handlin, published pro-immigration books (e.g., The Uprooted [1951/1973]) and articles. Handlin’s (1952) article, “The immigration fight has only begun,” was published in Commentary (published by the American Jewish Committee) shortly after the Democrat-controlled Congress overrode President Truman’s veto of the restrictionist 1952 law. In a telling comment indicating Jewish leadership of the pro-immigration forces, Handlin complained about the apathy of other “hyphenated Americans” in joining the immigration battle. He repeatedly uses the term “we”—as in “if we cannot beat [Sen. Pat] McCarran and his cohorts with their own weapons, we can do much to destroy the efficacy of those weapons” (p. 4)—suggesting Handlin’s belief in a unified Jewish interest in liberal immigration policy and presaging a prolonged “chipping away” of the 1952 legislation in the ensuing years mentioned by Graham (2003) as part of the context of the 1965 law and noted by Cofnas.

Handlin clearly rejected an ethnic status quo, arguing that it was “illusory [to expect] that the composition of American population will remain as it is” (Handlin, 1947, 6). And he never addressed the stated justification used by restrictionists in the 1924 debates, describing their attitudes as follows: “The hordes of inferior breeds, even then freely pouring into the country in complete disregard for the precepts of the new racial learning, would mix promiscuously with the Anglo-Saxon and inevitably produce a deterioration of the species” (1951/1973: 257). Handlin thus ignored the actual argument used by restrictionists during the Congressional debates of 1924—that the national origins formula was fair to all ethnic groups in the country because it created an ethnic status quo (MacDonald, 1998/202: 263) with its implicit and entirely defensible assumption from an evolutionary perspective that different ethnic groups have conflicts of interest on immigration (e.g., conflicts between Palestinians and Jews in Israel over a Palestinian right of return).

Handlin was a critical figure in the decades leading up to the passage of the 1965 law:


(read more and see references)

But Black Lives Matter... "The Value of A Life" Nonprofit in Dallas Exists to Convince Blacks Not to Kill Other Blacks

This article is basically an admission of racial differences, without admitting their existence. When future time-orientation and impulse control are absent (along with reason and accountability), you get a situation where “The Value of a Life” in educating black people not to kill other black people in Dallas is necessary.

Is there a white equivalent of this organization? An Asian? A Hispanic?

But Black Lives Matter… (read more)

Stress-Testing the Idea "Black Lives Matter": In Majority Black Atlanta, Police Beg Residents to Stop Shooting Each Other in Facebook Campaign

What is life like in Atlanta, the purported “Black Mecca” of America? It’s a city where the black majority continually stress-test the concept of “Black Lives Matter,” to the point where police have embarked on a social media campaign begging residents to stop shooting each other. [Atlanta cops beg residents to stop shooting each other in new campaign, New York Post, April 10, 2021]:

Maybe if they just ask nicely.


Repeat after me: Black. Lives. Matter. (read more)

Can We Just End the 'Black Lives Matter' Charade? Billboard Campaign in Charlotte Begs Black People to Stop Killing Other Blacks

Charlotte, North Carolina is a majority white city, but homicide appears to be an avocation primarily committed by the black minority population.

The violence of black people, almost exclusively by black individuals targeting other blacks, has nothing to do with white people.

It has everything to do with a lack of impulse control and a poor future time-orientation, which is a key indicator why these billboards must be tailored to the black community of Charlotte. Because without this community, Charlotte would be virtually free of violent crime.

Keep telling us Black Lives Matter, because billboards in Charlotte depicting black people shooting other black people – and begging such violence ends or else the black race is “lost” – is a powerful reminder they do not. (read more)

Not at all. My clever piece was rather mild, having had only 20 minutes to compose and post it. The House of Windsor is quite worthy of opprobrium. They are in league with the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab to effect the monstrous Great Reset.

The exclusion of William's half-brother was not an omission. Harry, the Count of Montecito (not Monte Cristo à la Alexander Dumas), has no blue blood (except perhaps in his vena cava). Harry came to be when a sperm cell, propelled by fate and a flagellum, joined a Spencerian ovum. Harry's biological father was a handsome horseman who amused a lonely Diana.

This is hardly a revelation. The tawdry details are known to a significant subset of those whose comings and goings are chronicled in the pages of The Tatler. Trust me, Harry resembles James Hewitt - his real daddy.

There is more to Harry's clumsy exit, stage left, than met the tabloids' eyes.

Charles the cuckold insisted on the break.

The Windsors held a Wannsee Conference of sorts to plan this solution.

Pure and simple, it was a purification of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha lineage.

"The plans differ. The planners are all alike."
- Frédéric Bastiat

United Airlines Announces Commitment to Make 50 Percent of Pilot Trainees Women or Racial Minorities

United Airlines has evidently decided their crop of pilots is too male and too white, thus they announced that 50 percent of their pilot trainees in the next decade will be women and [melanin] minorities.

The [racist and sexist] statement came in a Tuesday morning tweet.
 
“Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes every day,” it reads. “That’s why we plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.”

Accompanying the tweet was a video message that reads as follows: “By 2030, we plan to train 5,000 pilots through Unite Aviate Academy. We plan for 50% of [affirmative action] admitted students to be women and people of color. Partner organizations will help identify and recruit top talent. Together with JPMorgan Chase, we’re eliminating the financial barrier to entry for highly qualified and motivated candidates. Applications are open. Take your captain’s seat.” (read more)

Is token Negro Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin derelict in his duties?

In a restive and changing world, with the hegemon in decline and the neocons incessantly beating war drums, his priorities include: who gets to wear panties and lingerie, and who is an extremist.

What a "woke" loser.

It's a good thing millions of American patriots are well armed and can defend their homes.

Please read his ridiculous memorandum from yesterday. The subject is, Immediate Actions to Counter Extremism in the Department and the Establishment of the Countering Extremism Working Group.

Does anyone want to bet if the PowerPoint report of the working group is delivered by a blond and blue-eyed West Point graduate or a person of color who was admitted on waivers? (read more)

Here are the links to Legal Insurrection Foundation's coverage of the Chauvin trial.

"Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury."

– Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissent in the appeal of Leo Frank, 19 April 1915

Democrat Lawfare Group Including Perkins Coie Sends Legal Threat to Group Auditing Maricopa County Election

This is very interesting… and it appears the professional Democrat machine is increasingly apoplectic at the Maricopa, Arizona, ballot audit approved by the state senate and affirmed by the state courts.

The Arizona legislature authorized a full and comprehensive audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election ballots.

The Maricopa County board of elections has thrown every roadblock against the state legislature trying to block the audit.  However, a state judge agreed with the legislative intent and affirmed the authority of the audit.  Then the county board held an emergency secret meeting and refused to allow the auditors to use their facilities. {Go Deep}

Part of the audit authorization (included in the state’s audit instructions) was for a limited canvassing of actual voters; meaning the auditors can go to the homes/locations of people/groups and verify they actually voted or submitted the ballots attributed to them.  This ability to go directly to the source has triggered a politically connected legal team known as “Protect Democracy” into another level of panic.  The Protect Democracy group uses Clinton’s infamous law firm Perkins Coie.

Perkins Coie is threatening the contracted auditing agency, Florida-based Cyber Ninjas, with legal action if they follow through with their authority and question the voters who are attributed as sources of thousands of ballots in single geographic locations.  [Perkins Coie Threat Letter Here]

The auditing agency previously said:

(read more)

Chauvin Trial Day 9 Wrap-Up: Medical Experts Resuscitate Prosecution Case

Medical experts gave testimony state needed, without imploding on cross

Posted by Andrew Branca  Thursday, April 8, 2021 at 11:19pm

Overview

Today the state presented three medical/science experts. The first was Dr. Martin Tobin, Physician in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Chicago, presented as an expert witness on respiratory matters. He was followed by Daniel Isenschmit, Forensic Toxicologist, NMS Laboratories, who was involved in drug testing Floyd’s blood. And the day closed with Dr. William Smock, Emergency Medical Physician, and self-described “Police Surgeon,” who discussed excited delirium and some other issues.

OK folks, I won’t bury the lead—today’s trial proceedings looked a lot more typical for a prosecution presenting its case in chief than has been the case so far in Minnesota v. Chauvin.  What I mean by that is that the state finally had a day in which its own witnesses did not end up doing the defense more good than themselves.

We’ve grown so accustomed to Nelson simply having his way with prosecution witnesses that today might appear as if it were bad for the defense.  It would be more accurate to say it was not a great day for the defense—which is quite a change from past experience.

In truth, however, this is what every day of the trial should have looked like so far. Right now it is the prosecution in charge, presenting their case, in control of direct questioning.  The defense is very limited in what they can do on cross-examination. They can’t simply produce their own evidence for the jury, they can’t argue with the state’s witnesses, they are limited in their cross-examination to only the issues the state has chosen to raise in their direct questioning.

These are all real and substantive constraints on the defense while the prosecution is presenting their case in chief.  The amazing thing about this trial to date is how well the defense has been doing even while bound by those constraints.

Today was, again, far more typical of what should be expected.  The prosecution is putting forth its witnesses, framing the issues the way they want them framed, asking the scope of questions the way they want them scoped—every day should make the prosecution look just awesome.

The turnaround on that perception really ought not be expected until the defense has their turn at bat, gets to present their own witnesses, to frame the issues the way they want them framed, ask the scope of questions the way them want them scoped—and the state finds itself bound by all the constraints that so far have limited only the defense.

This is also why I urge all of you to not make day-to-day judgments about how the trial is going, at least not in the sense of expecting any day’s events to predict the likely outcome of the trial.   A football game is not decided in the first half, and a criminal prosecution ought not be expected to be a wrap when only the state’s version of the narrative has been fleshed out in court.

That said, the state got done what it needed to get done today with its expert witnesses, who unambiguously told the jury that Floyd’s death was the direct result of the police restraint used to hold him for EMS, period, and that nothing else mattered. Not Floyd’s fentanyl level, not Floyd’s substantial co-morbidities. Not Floyd’s poorly made decision to fight four police officers against lawful arrest.

So, as would normally be expected at this point in the trial, but which has gone missing up to now, the state had a good day today.

That’s not to say the defense did poorly, within the constraints already described.

I will note that Defense Counsel Eric Nelson definitely appeared tired today, he was hoarse, and clearing his throat. Could he be wearing down? With any luck tomorrow, Friday, will be an early day and he’ll have the weekend to get some R&R. I trust he’ll be back to form on Monday.

It must be said that getting handed new state exhibits at night, as occurred to him just last night, after being in court all day, and knowing that review of those exhibits will be necessary for cross-examination of witnesses today, certainly can’t be making his job any easier.

Dr. Martin Tobin, Physician in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Chicago

A couple of interesting points about Dr. Tobin, up front. First, although he normally charges substantial fees ($500 per hour) for acting as an expert witness in court, he agreed to provide his services in this case for free.  His explanation is that he’s never been an expert witness in a criminal trial before, so didn’t want to charge.  I suppose that could be why. Alternatively, I suppose it’s possible he’s motivated to do the job for free for political reasons.  Who knows?

Second, while Prosecutor Blackwell was walking Dr. Tobin through his background, training, education, expertise, and all the other stuff you do to qualify your expert in front of the jury, Dr. Tobin mentioned that a chunk of his practice consists of treating patients who require mechanical ventilation due to a variety of underlying causes—including drug overdose. No kidding.

Third, Tobin would arrive at his expert opinion after watching videos of the event literally “hundreds of times,” as well as after leisurely reviewing perhaps thousands of pages of investigative reports, forensic results, medical history and more.

None of that, of course, was available to officers on scene as they fought an intoxicated 6’ 6” 230-pound  Floyd as he violently resisted lawful arrest, in the presence of a hostile and threatening crowd, as they waited for the code 3 “lights and sirens” requested paramedics to finally arrive on scene.

In any case, Tobin gave Prosecutor Blackwell on direct questioning exactly what they needed from him, and that was an expert opinion, to a reasonably degree of professional certainty, that what killed Floyd was impaired breathing that resulted in sufficiently low oxygen levels to cause his death, as a result of the manner in which he was restrained by Chauvin and the other officers.  Here’s video of his testimony that captures those statements.

(video)

So there we have it: According to the opinion of the state’s retained expert witness, it was Chauvin et al. who killed Floyd.  Exactly as the state’s expert witness is supposed to do.  Surprise, surprise.

Blackwell stepped Tobin through more than two hours of direct questioning, during which Tobin provided a lengthy rationale for how he’d reached his opinion. Frankly, the entire rationale struck me as working back from a conclusion.  That is, it appeared that Tobin started with the conclusion that the officers’ conduct had killed Floyd, and then worked backwards from there to build out a framework that led him right back to where he’d started.

Of course, circumstances were quite different for the officers actually dealing with Floyd, who didn’t have the ability to see into the future and know that Floyd would die that day, nor did they know a great many other relevant facts made available to Tobin but unknown to the officers attempting to, first, lawfully arrest Floyd and, second, get him apparently badly needed medical care.

In addition, Tobin’s path to reach his opinion involved a substantial amount of high-level medical expertise, complex biological and physics models, even mathematics of a degree that the notation was indecipherable to this small-town lawyer. How any of this would be actionable by police officers called to a crime scene and compelled to fight a large and violently resisting suspect was not explained.

Tobin also demonstrated an amazing ability—or, at least, claimed an amazing ability—to make precise biological determinations from cell phone and body camera video.  For example, Tobin claimed to be able to tell the precise instant when Floyd suffered brain damage as a result of low oxygen levels (it was when Floyd abruptly kicked out a leg).

He could discern precisely what was happening within Floyd’s body, despite there being no physical manifestation of those processes either while Floyd was alive or upon medical examination after Floyd had died. Indeed, he claimed to discern the exact moment that Floyd died, by the expression on Floyd’s face:  “One second he’s alive, and one second he’s no longer.”

He had models illustrating loses in lung function to the individual percent, although he had no personal knowledge of Floyd’s respiratory capacity when alive.

When asked by Blackwell whether it was true that if someone could speak, it meant they could breathe, Tobin cautioned that this was a dangerous view, because just because someone was breathing now didn’t mean they would be breathing 10 seconds from now. Which strikes me as just another way of conceding that the actual statement itself is, in fact, true—if you’re speaking, you’re breathing.  Nobody has ever claimed that if you’re speaking now it means you’ll be breathing later.

To undercut the theory that Floyd might have died not from police restraint but because of fentanyl overdose, Tobin argued that this could not be the case because fentanyl slowed the rate of respiration, and from the video he measured Floyd’s rate of respiration as normal.

Unaddressed on direct was the fact that Floyd’s respiration was being subject to a wide variety of biological drivers besides fentanyl—including arguably the combination of Floyd’s COVID history and the prospects for long-term lung dysfunction, his existing cardiovascular disease, the presence of methamphetamine in his system, and his just completed 10-minute physical fight with multiple police officers [and his Sickle Cell Disease].

The bottom line, again, is that Tobin on direct delivered what any prosecution should expect their expert witnesses to deliver—the opinion they needed to buttress their narrative of guilt.

Here’s that couple of hours of direct questioning of Dr. Martin Tobin by Prosecutor Jerry Blackwell:

(video)

On cross-examination, Nelson touched on many of the points I hit on above.

Police officers have nowhere near the medical expertise of Tobin, indeed they’re not even trained to the level of an EMT.

Tobin had the luxury of watching the videos hundreds of times, all different angles, still framing, slow motion, and so forth, as well as seven meetings with the prosecutors, including as recently as yesterday and the day before.

Tobin had also had the opportunity to prepare for the prosecution a whole series of exhibits—diagrams, illustrations, graphs—to use alongside his testimony.

Exhibits that were provided to Defense Counsel Nelson … last night.

That’s not a typo. Last. Night.

Nelson also emphasized that the biological circumstances around Floyd’s death were not a simple model of four force factors and limited to the conduct of the officers, as simplistically described by Tobin, but in fact were much more complex. Floyd’s drug levels, his badly impaired health, his decision to fight four police officers for 10 minutes before they were compelled to restrain him for EMS, all played a role in that day’s outcome.

Tobin, however, insisted that it was all very simple. Just one biological process resulting solely from the officers’ force upon Floyd was all that mattered. Again, exactly what the state had ordered up from their expert witness.

On the “if you can speak you can breathe” issue, Nelson noted that in Tobin’s own report he’d written that even physicians often believe this to be true. Tobin agreed.  You may recall that state witness MPD use-of-force trainer Lt. Mercil had previously testified that he himself taught that concept when instructing officers.

Nelson pointed out that Tobin’s purportedly precise calculations of how many pounds of force Chauvin was placing on Floyd were based on assumptions.  You’ve assumed the weight of Chauvin on May 25, 2020? Yes. You’ve assumed the weight of his equipment, you didn’t actually weigh that equipment?  Correct.

Body weight force model assumes that Chauvin kept his weight equally balanced on both legs throughout his restraint of Floyd, but in fact his weight was pretty frequently re-distributed.  That’s correct, Tobin answered.

The biological models purporting to pin down precisely what happened to Floyd internally as he was restrained by police were based on generalized assumptions for a 46-year-old of the same height and weight as Floyd. Yes.

Who is healthy. Yes. Of course, we know that Floyd was far from healthy, with severe cardiovascular disease—including a 95% blockage of a coronary artery and severe hypertension—as well as recent COVID

In the real world, Nelson suggested, the specific biology of Floyd comes into play.  That’s correct, answered Tobin.

On the issue of fentanyl, Tobin insisted that the drug could not have played a role in Floyd’s death because he claimed Floyd’s respiration was not depressed, as would be the case with fentanyl overdose.  Might there be competing factors that could offset fentanyl’s respiratory effect, at least transiently?  Meth on board? Adrenaline from a physical fight with police?  Tobin downplayed the importance of these factors.

Also on the topic of fentanyl, Tobin insisted that fentanyl made people sleepy, even unconscious, when it killed via overdose, and Floyd had after all just been fighting police.  In response Nelson brought up the pill fragments found in the squad car, the pills that were found to consist of fentanyl and meth, covered in Floyd’s DNA.

If Floyd had consumed the pills in the squad car immediately before being proned on the street, wouldn’t we expect it to take some five minutes before the drugs reached peak effect? Yes, answered Tobin. And continue their effect after that point? Yes.

This would coincide, of course, with that period of time in which Floyd was visibly slowing down and apparently losing consciousness.

With respect to how Tobin had purportedly identified the precise moment at which Floyd had suffered brain damage, the kick of Floyd’s leg, Nelson asked if it might be reasonable for a police officer to perceive such movement as continued resistance.  The state objected, and that objection was sustained—but the jury heard the question posed, which was really the point.

And that about wrapped up Nelson’s cross-examination of Tobin:

Tobin Cross-Examination

(video)

Make no mistake, however, that this cross-examination was nothing like the train wreck the state had experienced with so many of their earlier witnesses, including experts, including MPD officers.  Nelson hit important points on cross-examination, but Tobin remained adamant that it was the officers’ restraint of Floyd that killed him, period.

In short, as already noted, Tobin served the purposes the state intended for him when he was retained as a medical expert for this trial, precisely as he ought to have done for the state.

There were also brief re-directs, re-cross, and even a re-re-direct of Tobin, but none really amounted to much. In any case, here they are:

(3 videos)

Daniel Isenschmit, Forensic Toxicologist, NMS Laboratories

The next state’s witness was Forensic Toxicologist Daniel Isenschmit, of NMS Laboratories, whose direct questioning was conducted by Prosecutor Erin Eldridge.

Isenschmit had been involved in toxicology screening of Floyd’s blood, with a particular focus on concentrations of fentanyl and its metabolites, as well as methamphetamine.

The purpose of this testimony was to play around with various statistics to encourage the jury to infer that Floyd could not have died of fentanyl overdose. In this context, Isenschmit compared the concentrations of fentanyl, metabolite afentanyl, and methamphetamine to selected populations of people who had also tested positive for these drugs, with the goal of showing that, hey, look, Floyd’s drug levels weren’t really all that high after all!

As a reminder, Floyd had a concentration of fentanyl in his blood of 11 ng/ml, often described (including by me) as a three-fold fatal dose of the drug.  It must be said that this fatal dose is presumably for a naïve user of fentanyl, and that a chronic user could have a substantially higher tolerance—and indeed, would be expected to.

Of course, we also have testimony from Floyd’s co-addict lady friend that he had (she claimed) been clean for some lengthy period prior to the May 25, 2020 arrest, right up until shortly before that event when he began using again. Tolerance is lost as well as acquired, so to what extent Floyd had fentanyl tolerance on the day of his death is probably unknowable.

In any case, Isenschmit would present the jury with a chart like this one:

(chart)

The point was to illustrate that, hey, when NMS Labs tested the blood of 19,815 people who had died and who also had fentanyl in their system, those people had an average concentration of 16.80 ng/ml, and a median level of 10.0 ng/ml.

Well, look at that—now Floyd’s concentration of 11 ng/ml doesn’t look so bad? I mean, look at all those dead people, they had a way higher average concentration of fentanyl than did Floyd. Surely that means Floyd could not have died of fentanyl overdose!

One obvious weakness of this argument is rather dependent on people not understanding what an average and a median are—and that’s probably a pretty safe assumption these days.

The median of 10 ng/ml, for example, means that exactly half of the dead people had blood concentrations greater than that amount—but it also means that half of the dead people had blood concentrations lower—and therefore lower than Floyd’s concentration of fentanyl.

Even worse, however, and a point brought up by Nelson on cross-examination, these dead people were not necessarily people who died of fentanyl overdose—they were just people who died, who happened to also test positive for fentanyl.

Could they be people who were fentanyl users who had died not from fentanyl but because they’d been shot? Sure. Because they’d been in a car accident? Sure. Because they’d had cancer? Sure.

Did Isenschmit know what any of these people had died from? He did not.

Was it possible that of the 19,815 people whose positive fentanyl result was included in this graph, fully 19,814 of them had died of gunshot wound?

It was unlikely, Isenschmit replied. But of course, that’s not really the point.

If the presentation of this data is to suggest that Floyd’s 11 ng/ml was too low to have killed him, this data is in fact entirely useless for that purpose, but we’re not comparing apples to apples, fentanyl overdose death to fentanyl overdose deaths.

A second data presentation, this one in the form of a pie chart, was also presented, for much the same purpose:

(chart)

This one purported to compare fentanyl concentrations found among people involved in DUI, on the one hand, and Floyd, on the other hand. Here the data representation was really remarkably disingenuous, particular in the manner in which data was sorted and organized within the pie.

I mean, look at that—about 10% of the people involved in DUI cases had fentanyl levels comparable to those of Floyd! And they were alive, driving cars! Surely that means Floyd’s mere 11 ng/ml of fentanyl could not have been a fatal dose!

Much like the chart above, however, the presentation of the data here intended to mislead. Before, we were presented with dead people who tested positive for fentanyl, but had to dig before we learned we had no idea whether they’d died of fentanyl or from some entirely unrelated cause.

Here we are presented with DUI cases, but guess what—we have no idea of any driver’s intoxication was the result of fentanyl or some entirely unrelated substance—meth, pot, even simple alcohol.

So, again, we’re not comparing apples to apples.

There is, of course, a fundamentally different flaw in all of this data presentation and that is that even if we had apples to compare to apples, all the apples are substantively different—so not even that comparison can be done.

If we had the identical fentanyl dose, and gave it to two different people, the physiological response could easily be wildly different, depending on their size, general health, developed tolerance to fentanyl or other opiates, and more.

But we never have identical fentanyl doses, because there’s no control for that in this data.

Some of these people were likely taking fentanyl lawfully prescribed by a physician for lawful purpose.  Others were taking prescription drugs, but unlawfully. At least those two populations have some idea of the dose they were ingesting, because they are consuming pharmaceutical grade fentanyl.

Many of those people, however, are consuming street fentanyl—and there are no Good Manufacturing Practices for street fentanyl.  No two pills are the same even physically characteristics, much less in their constituent chemistry.  When one takes a street fentanyl, one is taking an unknown dose of fentanyl, and one likely mixed with some other combination of illicit drugs, methamphetamine being a common pairing.

The direct of Isenschmit then stepped through a similar faux data representation in the context of methamphetamine, but I won’t bother dragging you through that here.

I will note, however, that it does appear that Floyd’s concentration of methamphetamine was rather low.  This raises the legitimate question of whether it could have had the “offset” function to counter the sedative effects of fentanyl as has been occasionally suggested by Nelson.  Obviously, the state’s witnesses play down that possibility, so having heard only [from] them the theory appears tenuous. We won’t really have an informed understanding, of course, until we hear from the defense medical experts later in the trial.

Another issue raised by Eldridge on direct of Isenschmit was the ratio between fentanyl and its metabolite afentanyl.  So, when fentanyl is ingested we get an immediate level of fentanyl in the blood, and then over time the fentanyl is metabolized to afentanyl, which can also be measured.  If limited to that single dose, eventually the levels of fentanyl will drop as the levels of the metabolite afentynal will increase.

Floyd had significant levels of both fentanyl and afentanyl in his system. Eldridge argued from this that, hey, look, Floyd must have taken his last dose of fentanyl some time ago, because a bunch of it had already metabolized to afentanyl—therefore, given that the peak effect of fentanyl occurred five minutes after dosing, Floyd could not still have been under the effect of fentanyl when subject to arrest.

If Floyd had only just taken fentanyl moments before, there would have been no time for afentanyl to be present at such meaningful levels.

There is, of course, an entirely distinct and opposite interpretation of that same data, and it was one pointed out by Nelson on cross-examination.  What if we’re not talking about someone who took just a single dose of fentanyl, but rather someone who took fentanyl on a habitual basis—like, you know, a opioid drug addict like Floyd.

In that case we’d expect him to take fentanyl dose 1, fentanyl levels would quickly spike, then begin to drop as levels of the metabolite afentynal increased.  Left there, eventually fentanyl would go to zero, even as afentynal was increasing.

But what if the user than took a second dose of fentanyl—perhaps while fighting multiple officers in the back of a squad car, spewing partially chewed and spit-covered fentanyl tablets over the back seat of the vehicle in the process? Then we’d expect to see the afentanyl levels present for the metabolization of dose 1, but also high fentanyl levels present from the just-taken dose 2.

Nelson pointed out some of these data incongruities and metabolite deceptions in his cross of Isenschmit, but I’m pretty sure that he wasn’t a statistics major in college, and so it was difficult to substantively and clearly undermine Isenschmit’s presentation of these data and figures.

And even if Nelson had possessed the necessary statistical savvy, the effectiveness of deploying it would also be a function of the ability of the jury to absorb what was being said—and I expect there wasn’t all that much of that ability for much of this jury.

If all Isenschmit accomplished for the state was to throw some data and charts in front of the jury at the prosecution’s request, and created the inference that this meant the prosecution’s narrative on the role of fentanyl in Floyd’s death was supported by “the science,” he accomplished his mission for the state—at least, again, until the defense can bring their own medical experts before the jury.

(3 videos)

Dr. William Smock, Emergency Medical Physician, “Police Surgeon”

The next state medical expert witness, and the last of the day, was one Dr. William (“Bill”) Smock, an Emergency Medical Physician who claimed specialized training in forensic medicine.  Direct questioning was conducted by Prosecutor Jerry Blackwell.

Frankly, Dr. Smock struck me as a bit of a nut job.  He was portrayed by the state as having a substantive expertise in forensics.  In fact, a close reading of his self-stated background and qualifications suggests his expertise is much more akin to that of a hobbiest in forensics than actual formal expertise.

Further, he oddly informed the court that he engaged in “living forensics,” which he described as applying the same forensic techniques to living patients as was more routinely applied to corpses. I’m presuming that does not include autopsy.

Further, Dr. Smock is not board certified in forensics, has no degree in forensics, and has never been employed to do forensics.  Rather, he has “specialized training” in forensics.  This could simply mean that he has a personal interest in the subject and attends local continuing medical education courses in the subject. Oh, and he subscribes to a forensics science journal—though I note he did not say he actually reads it, he only said he “gets it.”

Like Dr. Tobin at the start of the day, Smock was present for the explicit purpose of sharing his expert opinion that Floyd’s death was the result of hypoxia induced by police restraint of Floyd, period.  And he did that.

Indeed, he stated outright at the start of direct questioning: “Floyd died of positional asphyxia from pressure to his chest, back, and neck.” Period.

He had as a second purpose to share his opinion that excited delirium could not have been a causal factor of Floyd’s death, and he spent considerable time during his direct questioning focused on this particular issue.

Specifically, he showed a list of 10 characteristics of excited delirium, announced that at least 6 of the 10 must be present for a diagnosis of excited delirium, and then concluded that in fact not a single one of the 10 characteristics could be found in Floyd—and thus excited delirium was off the table.

I found Smock’s testimony on this point to be really disingenuous, in that he would carefully cherry pick Floyd’s conduct from different points during the interaction with police until he found evidence that was contrary to a diagnosis of excited delirium—and then would choose the next example of Floyd’s conduct from a different point in the Floyd timeline entirely.  As a result, his portrayal of Floyd as not suffering from excited delirium was made up of a patchwork of different Floyd characteristics chosen from different points of time.

Here’s Smock’s slide with the 10 characteristics of excited delirium:

(chart)

Note that one of these is “constant/near constant physical activity.”  In concluding that this characteristic was off the table in terms of a diagnosis of excited delirium that could have caused Floyd’s death, Smock pointed to the period very late in Floyd’s restraint and pointed out that he wasn’t moving much.

Well, of course he wasn’t—he was probably dead, or about to die. And that period of relative inactivity would be true of every single person who has ever died while experiencing excited delirium—once dead, they engaged in very limited physical activity.

Another factor is “unexpected/unusual strength.” In this context Smock claimed this characteristic was missing because Floyd wasn’t merely hurling the officers off him like the Hulk.  Of course, it’s also true that early in the confrontation Floyd managed to fight off four police officers attempting to place him in a squad car until they gave up the effort as futile. If that’s not remarkable strength, I don’t know what is.

I could go on with other characteristics, viewed from one perspective by Smock for the jury, but also readily viewed from an entirely different perspective by a reasonable commentator—but the truth is it doesn’t matter.

The legal question on the subject of excited delirium is not whether Floyd’s conduct and appearance actually met the clinical criteria for diagnosis as that would be applied by a highly trained and experienced physician with the appropriate background and education—you know, like Dr. Smock.

Rather, the legal question is whether a reasonable police officer could have believed that he might be dealing with a citizen suffering from excited delirium, thus warranting use of the police-trained response for that condition, which is full-body restraint, from head to toe, until EMS arrives with the ketamine.

It’s not important for legal purposes whether officers possessing such a belief are correct. It’s only important for legal purposes that the belief, even if mistaken, was reasonably and genuinely held, given the background, training, and experience of a police officer not even trained to EMS standards.

Whether a medical doctor making an evaluation with the luxury [of] repeatedly watching a variety of videos from all different angles, the full medical history of the suspect, as well as the suspect’s autopsy and toxicology results, would have come to the same conclusion is entirely irrelevant to whether the officer’s conduct was reasonable and lawful.

Smock was also used to attack the defense theory that Floyd’s fentanyl concentration might have contributed to his death, and he did so in a genuinely ridiculous manner.

Why, Smock recounted, there was one time when Floyd was brought to the hospital after taking 7 or 8 fentanyl pills, and it didn’t kill him. Indeed, all they did was watch him for a while and then let him go.  (This was likely the year-earlier drug ingestion event by Floyd upon police contact.). Based on that experience, the notion that 11 ng/ml of fentanyl might have killed him on May 25, 2020 was ridiculous.

The flaws in this reasoning are obvious and numerous.

First, we have no idea if Floyd had a substantially higher tolerance at the year earlier event than he did on May 25. Indeed, we have reason to believe that his tolerance on May 25 may have been much reduced, based on the testimony of his co-addict lady friend that he had been “clean” for a lengthy period of time leading up to that date.

Second, on the year earlier event he’d consumed fentanyl and had a bad response, but there was a lot of things that he didn’t do like it was May 25, 2020. For one, he didn’t fight police for 10 minutes as they attempted to lawfully load him into a squad car, even as he was apparently munching on who knows how many fentanyl tablets in the process.  He also wasn’t subject to arrest and restraint for 10 minutes or so while officers waited for the EMS they’d summoned on “code 3” lights and sirens basis.

As has always been the case, it is most likely not that any single factor killed Floyd, but that all the factors, working in combination, killed Floyd—his fentanyl levels, his compromised physiology, his lawful restraint by police, his poorly made decision to fight four officers for a full 10 minutes, and more.

Nelson did an OK job on cross-examination of Smock, but Smock was an experienced expert witness who knew who was paying him $300 an hour, and given that opposing counsel isn’t actually allowed to argue with the other side’s expert witnesses, there’s only so much Nelson is able to do in cross.

Again, the real counterpunch from the defense can’t realistically be expected until the defense presents its own case in chief and calls its own medical experts on direct.  We’ve simply been spoiled in this trial with how skillfully Nelson has been able to routinely turn the state’s expert witnesses against them. That is not the norm, and ought not be expected.

(3 videos)

Bottom line, the state finally had a non-implosive day at trial, which is just another way of saying that today was the normal kind of day one should typically expect with a prosecution presenting their case in chief.  It’s supposed to look good for them right now. That’s how it works. The state’s narrative is supposed to take its hits not during their own case in chief, but only after the defense gets their turn on the offensive.

OK, folks before I close out for the evening, I feel obliged to let you all know that I will not be covering the trial tomorrow, as I have been doing since jury selection began.  I’m afraid I have other obligations to attend to.  I will therefore leave you in the good hands of Professor Jacobson and the wonderful contributors and staff of Legal Insurrection.

But worry not, I’ll be back on the case come Monday!

Until then, stay safe! (read more)

Alas, E2 has lost her consort.

Prince Philip was inbred for Babbittry, with an enthusiasm for eugenics and a propensity for sashaying in kilts.

Did E2 select him outright or was she given a list of appropriate candidates?

The issues of his loins are not intellectual luminaries. E2 would have done better coupling with a German Elector or Palatine, or the first-born son of an English baron with an advanced Oxbridge degree in the hard sciences or philosophy.

This recently departed Philip sired no Alexander.

His first-born son also sprang from the shallow end of the gene pool. Charles, when he does not act like the village idiot, reminds one of a true believer in phlogiston, spontaneous generation, an Aristotelian universe and anthropogenic global warming. Yes, he firmly anchors the far left end of the Bell Curve.

And his brother? Randy Andy, one could say, has risen to the occasion. Andrew has fulfilled the desires of women and girls who fantasize about English perpendiculars. His familiarity with the lay of the land of Epstein's world has been revealed by several sources. Ms. Maxwell, if she lives to testify, could attest to that.

At least the first-born of Diana Spencer has an IQ above the mean (if only barely).

“I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist…. I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.”

- Prince Philip, If I Were an Animal – United Kingdom, Robin Clark Ltd., 1986.