Darrell Castle has been an attorney for over 40 years and talks today about the trial and verdict of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd. He does not question the verdict but rather the reaching of the verdict in advance of the trial as the American legal system is based on the idea that one is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

AMERICANS ARE SEEING TWO DIFFERENT MOVIES

Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday the 23rd day of April in this the year of our Lord 2021. I will be talking about the trial and verdict of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd. I do not question the verdict, but I question the deciding of the verdict in advance of the trial. In America, the system is based on the idea that one is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Why bother with a trial if we already know the verdict?

The Castle family is doing well health wise on this Friday as we continue to enjoy spring. It has been a little chilly this week in the river city with lows in the 30’s but as a famous Russian once said, how can you enjoy summer without winter to give it sweetness. The family daughter is holding up as best one can in the city of angels.

The system that I have spent my life believing in and trusting in now seems to be getting more irrational and delusional each day. Throughout my educational life I was taught that the criminal justice system was a search for truth and therein justice would be found, and when found, justice was blind. It was to operate by a system of rules that were sacrosanct and was to be as free of outside bias as it is possible to make it. The process is to be protected as more important than the outcome.

The questions for the Minneapolis jury to decide were basically did Chauvin actually cause George Floyd’s death or was there some other cause, and if he did cause it, did he do it while committing a felony offense with force. The media, however, had a far different agenda which was unfortunately joined by various politicians up to and including the President of the United States, more than one member of congress, the Governor of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Attorney General. The motives of those people are personal to each of them, but the result was to take the final result out of the hands of the jury. I guess they do not trust the jury system, so they had to help it decide.

The interjection of those people into what would normally be a local case as well as the media’s determination to turn it into a national one caused a great deal of damage in the case but more importantly damage to the system of justice itself. We are now left with questions such as, was the verdict just, given the facts or was the jury influenced by the threat of cities burning across America, and by politicians calls for violent confrontation, etc.

The headlines of the Memphis Commercial Appeal yesterday read “Justice Prevailed.” That implies that if the jury had reached a different verdict, then justice would not have prevailed which means that the verdict was already decided in advance because no other verdict would be justice. That is a very dangerous way to treat the criminal justice system. Today you may have the media and politicians on your side so you can intimidate the results in your favor, but tomorrow it might be a different majority and a different result.

What the politicians did was leave open a clear avenue of appeal which probably should have resulted in a mistrial or dismissal. To say during trial with a non-sequestered jury, that Floyd’s death was murder in the full light of day, and it ripped the blinders off our society, is influencing and intimidating a jury. When Maxine Waters came to town and urged more violent confrontation and a guilty verdict, the judge should have declared a mistrial or dismissed the charges. Instead,