Leftist legal star Alan Dershowitz said the U.S. Supreme Court should and very well might overturn the unjust conviction of Derek Chauvin in the death of drug addict George Floyd.
A “sword of Damocles” hung over jurors, Dershowitz told Newsmax. “They feared for their lives and the safety of their families, if not the safety of Americans in cities that were sure to explode if the verdict wasn’t guilty.” Dershowitz blamed radical leftists such as Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and race hustler Al Sharpton for the atmosphere of intimidation.
“I think it should be reversed on appeal,” Dershowitz said.
But he didn’t stop there. He also said the judge failed in his duty to sequester the jury and protect it from outside pressure. And he will likely sentence Chauvin to more time than such a defendant would normally receive. The reason: Again, fear of the mob.
The leftist political agenda of identity politics, Dershowitz said, has corrupted the criminal-justice system.
Jury Terrified
On Tuesday, the jury convicted the former Minneapolis police officer on two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter, despite evidence that Floyd overdosed on the powerful opioid fentanyl and had serious cardiovascular problems. Floyd also had the China virus, known as COVID-19.
But the jurors voted to convict, Dershowitz firmly said, because they were terrified.
“What was done to George Floyd by Officer Chauvin was inexcusable, morally,” Dershowitz said. “But the verdict is very questionable, because of the outside influences of people like Al Sharpton, and people like Maxine Waters.”
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On Saturday, Waters said the jury had better convict or “we’ve got to get more confrontational.” Sharpton warned that “America is on trial” when the trial began.
The “threats and intimidation” from the radicals — “the sword of Damocles over the jury” — had a message, he said:
If you don’t convict on the murder charge, on all the charges, the cities will burn, the country will be destroyed, seeped into the jury room because the judge made a terrible mistake by not sequestering the jury. So the judge himself said, this case may be reversed on appeal. And I think it might be reversed on appeal. I think it should be reversed on appeal.
The emeritus law professor at Harvard said the American Civil Liberties Union would “be all over this case” were it not “racially charged,” and that Americans have good reason to be worried about the future of due process because of the threats.
“Every juror in that room knew about those threats,” he continued:
And when they sit and deliberate, they have to be saying to themselves, consciously or unconsciously, if I were to render a verdict other than a murder verdict, what the consequences will be, for me, and my family, my friends, my business. That should never, ever, be allowed to seep into a jury room. So I have no real confidence that this verdict — which may be correct in some ways — but I have no confidence that this verdict was produced by due process and the rule of law, rather than the influence of the crowd.
Dershowitz accused Waters and Sharpton of following the “playbook of the Deep South in the 1920s,” when public officials whipped up crowds outside courthouses who demanded the conviction of blacks and acquittal of whites. Higher courts overturned those verdicts for the same reason a higher court must overturn Chauvin’s.
Pointing to the famous case of Sam Sheppard, Dershowitz said the Supreme Court has overturned verdicts not because of what happened inside a courtroom but what happened outside of it.
President Biden’s calling for the right verdict was not problematic, he said, because the jury was sequestered to render a verdict when Biden spoke.
The Judge
Dershowitz also came down on Judge Peter Cahill. “This judge did not do a good enough job in insulating the jury from outside pressures” because he simply told the jurors not to watch the news, which isn’t good enough in an age of social media and smartphones.
As well, the judge will likely sentence Chauvin harshly because he, too, fears the mob.
“Unfortunately, he’s probably putting his finger up to the wind and seeing what sentence he should impose that wouldn’t result in all kinds of riots,” Dershowitz said:
The whole judicial system has been corrupted by identity politics and by the weaponization of the criminal justice system toward particular agendas. So, I’m not confident this judge will impose the sentence he would normally impose if the world weren’t watching.
Even so, Dershowitz observed, Cahill himself said that Waters’s interference might have created grounds for a successful appeal.
