Derek Chauvin has been pictured in his first mugshot taken at the maximum security prison in Minnesota where he’s on suicide watch after being found guilty on all three counts of murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd.
The Minnesota Department of Corrections released the new booking photo today as Chauvin woke up from his first night at MCF-Oak Park Heights.
The 45-year-old dressed in an orange jumpsuit appeared tired and puffy-eyed with a frown and his hair in disarray.
It took the jury just over ten hours of deliberation to find Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter on Tuesday based on a mountain of evidence and testimony presented over 15 days of trial in the Hennepin County court.
Chauvin faces a minimum sentence of 12.5 years and maximum of 40 years for second-degree murder.
He will only be sentenced on that charge because all three stemmed from the same crime.
Prosecutors have not been clear about how long they will ask the judge to put Chauvin away for but they have said they will ask him to consider aggravating factors and go beyond the sentencing guidelines.
The former cop is expected to file a swift appeal of his conviction.
Over the course of the trial his defense attorney Eric Nelson repeatedly raised concerns that the massive media attention to the case would bias the jury and prevent his client from receiving a fair trial.
Tuesday’s verdict triggered cheers outside the Minneapolis courthouse and massive celebrations across America while Joe Biden vowed to push through civil rights reforms after the killing he called a ‘stain on the nation’s soul.’
Within minutes Biden phoned Floyd’s family to tell them that his death, which had sparked a wave of global Black Lives Matter protests, was going to ‘change the world’.
The president was backed by other senior Democrats, including Barack Obama, who said: ‘We know that true justice is about much more than a single verdict in a single trial.’
This morning, Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the Justice Department is opening a sweeping investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department’s policing practices that will examine whether the force engages in systemic discrimination and how it handles allegations of misconduct.
Garland said Tuesday’s verdict in the Chauvin case ‘does not address potentially systemic policing issues in Minneapolis.
‘The probe is a civil investigation ‘to determine whether the Minneapolis Police Department engages in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional or unlawful policing,’ he said.
Chauvin looked around in seeming disbelief as the judge read the decision on Tuesday, which centered around footage of the nine minutes and 29 seconds that he had knelt on Floyd’s neck as the handcuffed, unarmed black man cried out: ‘I can’t breathe’ on May 25, 2020.
Chauvin was led away in handcuffs as the judge immediately revoked his bail pending sentencing and dispatched him to Minnesota’s only maximum security prison, MCF-Oak Park Heights.
While most Americans of both political parties cheered the verdict, some white nationalists, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson, suggested the jurors weren’t swayed by the testimony of more than three dozen witnesses or visceral video of Floyd pleading during nine and a half minutes, “I can’t breathe.”
Instead, Carlson argued, the jurors were intimidated into the guilty verdict by the months of racial justice protests that followed Floyd’s death.
“The jurors in the Derek Chauvin trial came to a unanimous and unequivocal verdict this afternoon: ‘Please don’t hurt us,’” Carlson said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Carlson’s show, which was devoted entirely to attacking the trial as unfair because of protests and statements by Democrats urging a guilty verdict, stood in stark contrast to several prominent colleagues on Fox News who celebrated the result.
Jeanine Pirro, a former county judge who is an opinion host on Fox, said “clearly, the verdict is supported by the facts.”
Carlson, who has long been accused of being a racist, has cast doubt on the case against Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes before his death.
In February, Carlson said, “There was no physical evidence that George Floyd was murdered by a cop. The autopsy showed that George Floyd almost certainly died of a drug overdose, fentanyl.”
In fact, two autopsies — one private and one done by Hennepin County — both concluded Floyd’s death was a homicide.
On Monday, Carlson accused the media of “lynching” Chauvin, adding that most Americans “still cannot say with any specificity just how” Floyd died.
Carlson wasn’t the only one making this argument.
Rob Schmitt, host of “Rob Schmitt Tonight” on the conservative pro-Trump network Newsmax, said Chauvin was a “sacrifice to the mob” after he was found guilty.
“They say justice is blind. I don’t think it was blind in this case at all,” Schmitt said. “I think you have political pressure. I think you have pressure from all these activist groups going into all this. And I think at the end of the day people say, ‘You know what? If we acquit this guy, this city is going to burn to the ground.'”
“So you had a jury that said, ‘You know what? We’re gonna have to sacrifice this guy to the mob.’ And that’s exactly what I think happened today,” Schmitt added.