Pardon Derek Chauvin? Not on your life, Mr. President.
It’s one thing to paint over the Black Lives Matter mural on the streets of Washington, D.C. It’s quite another to paint over the murder of George Floyd, which Ben Shapiro is proposing and Elon Musk is apparently supporting.
Shapiro said that President Trump should issue a pardon for Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on Floyd’s neck until Floyd died, of the federal charges to which he pleaded guilty.
I wrote a book with Angela Harrelson, Floyd’s aunt and his closest relative in Minneapolis, “Lift Your Voice – How The Murder of My Nephew George Floyd Changed The World.” So perhaps I see the situation with a little more clarity than Shapiro does.
Shapiro makes three arguments for the pardon. The first is that Chauvin was not the proximate cause of Floyd’s death. Floyd, Shapiro argues, died of an unrelated heart ailment. Excuse me? If someone kneels on my neck for nine minutes, I’m going to die of something.
Second, Shapiro says, society was convulsed by the riots that followed. The rioting and looting after Floyd’s murder is indeed indefensible. People smashing windows and grabbing Uggs cannot be regarded as a proper civil protest. But Chauvin had nothing to do with the protests. He committed a crime, and thank God, he’s doing the time. He doesn’t get a pass for what he did just because society went nuts afterward.
Finally, Shapiro argues, the jury was under intense pressure to return a guilty verdict for Chauvin, so the conviction should be overturned. First, the jury was sequestered, so how would it have known about societal pressure to convict? Second, if that’s Chauvin’s argument, he should make it on appeal. Third, if the argument was rejected by an appellate court, game over.
If Trump were to pardon Chauvin, the state conviction would still stand, so the former cop wouldn’t be seeing the light of day until the mid-2030s. He would simply get out a little sooner.
But the message to Black America would be horrible — that if one of you gets killed, the system will protect the killer, not the victim. Same as in the century of lynching that followed the end of slavery, as if nothing has changed.
Here's the backstory on Floyd: Yes, he committed a heinous crime, holding a gun to the belly of a pregnant woman during a robbery. Unlike Shapiro’s wish for Floyd’s murderer, Floyd served his full four-year sentence for the robbery. He did the crime and he did the time.
Floyd came to Minneapolis from his native Houston because he wanted to get sober. He was living at the Salvation Army and working two jobs, getting more than a year off drugs and alcohol. His mother was dying. He wanted to go visit her and say goodbye.
According to Harrelson, Floyd’s aunt, his mother told him not to come. If he visited her in Houston’s notorious Fourth Ward, she believed, he would go back to drugs.
So he didn’t go, convinced that his mother’s illness wasn’t fatal. She passed away, leaving Floyd (he was known as Perry, also his father’s nickname) heartbroken. Floyd eventually lost his sobriety and returned to drugs. He was trying to pass a fake $20 bill when Chauvin put a knee to his neck.
What Floyd did while drinking and using was indeed criminal behavior. He was no saint. But he had completed his sentence and returned to society seeking to be a better person, no different from any alcoholic or addict trying to mend his or her ways.
Did he deserve to be murdered for passing a bad twenty? Of course not. Do any of Shapiro’s arguments hold water? Not in the least.
Trump is walking a fine line these days with the Black community, given his dismantling of DEI at the federal level and in the private sector. Blacks and Latinos supported the president’s reelection in record numbers. Many, according to reports, are supportive of his taking down of DEI, because they see merit as the best way to get an education or a job.
But if Trump were to pardon Chauvin, it would be a knee to the neck of Black America. Here's hoping that Chauvin pays the full price for what he did.
Michael Levin, a New York Times bestselling author, runs www.MeaningBooks.com, a provider of ghostwritten business books and memoirs.
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