Should a guilty verdict really be this shocking?
On Tuesday, Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee into the neck of George Floyd, a Black man, on the ground for more than nine minutes, was found guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter. |
Some would call it justice. "But until justice for Black people killed by the state exists not only in the extraordinary case but also in the mundane, until it is not shocking that an officer is held accountable for murder, the crusade continues," writes columnist Charles Blow. |
After all, "One court case can't eradicate the distrust that lingers in the hearts of many Black and brown Americans," Esau McCaulley says. And this court case was far from the norm: It is rare for a police encounter to "be documented as thoroughly as this one," Farhad Manjoo writes. "And so even if the verdict, this time, was just, it does little to restrain the freedom we give the police to kill people." That it took such an "enormous trove required to convict this single murderous cop" is a damning indictment of America's current state, Manjoo says. |
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