In an effort to challenge Derek Chauvin’s conviction in the federal case that resulted in the death of George Floyd, his attorneys are attempting to re-examine Floyd’s heart tissue to see if he truly died from asphyxiation caused by Chauvin sitting his knee for more than nine minutes.
Chauvin’s attorneys want to re-examine Floyd’s heart in order to test a theory that the 46-year-old Black man died from a heart condition that was made even worse by a rare tumor and not from the former Minneapolis police officer’s actions that were infamously caught on video, according to the Associated Press,
On top of having access to Floyd’s heart tissue, they want photos of his heart, histology slides, and samples of his bodily fluids.
Although U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson granted permission to the defense on Monday, prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota are not letting this slide so easily and asked Magnuson to reconsider his decision.
In a 10-page motion filed on Tuesday, attorneys claimed that Chauvin had “no legal basis for [his] discovery requests, all of which stem solely from an email he received from an unvetted doctor offering a weaker version of the medical defense than the version that the jury had previously rejected at his state trial.”
It later added, “Counsel made a choice, based on his prior consultation with other experts and his experience defending Defendant’s state trial, not to order certain forensic testing or further discuss with Defendant a variation of an expert defense that had already failed at that trial; this is precisely the type of strategic decision that courts have recognized as ‘virtually unchallengeable.”
To be clear, this re-examination attempts to challenge his conviction in a federal case that resulted in a 20-year sentence. He was also found guilty in a state case and sentenced to 22 years. The federal sentence was ordered to run concurrently with his state sentence.