George Clooney says Chauvin should volunteer to have knee on his neck at trial
The Hollywood superstar has been emailing the attorney for George Floyd's family with his reaction to the case
Actor George Clooney is so engrossed with the current murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin that he has contacted George Floyd’s family’s attorney to suggest a few tips on how to respond to the defense lawyers.
Nationally renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump made a virtual appearance on The View on Wednesday and revealed that the Hollywood star emails him from time to time with comments about Chauvin’s murder trial. Crump, who represents Floyd’s family, told the hosts that in one email, Clooney responded to defense attorneys suggesting that drugs caused Floyd’s death, and not Chauvin kneeling on his neck for nearly minutes in May 2020.
Read More: Expert: Chauvin never took knee off Floyd’s neck
Per Entertainment Tonight, Crump said of Clooney’s email, “‘Attorney Crump, you should tell them if Derek Chauvin feels so confident in that, he should volunteer during his case, to get down on the floor in that courtroom, and let somebody come and put their knee on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds and be able to see if he can survive.'”
Crump added, “The experts will opine during this case that the average human being can go without oxygen from 30 seconds to 90 seconds — where George Floyd went without oxygen for over 429 seconds, and that’s why it was intentional what this officer did. And I believe in my heart, Joy Behar, that he will be held criminally liable and it will hopefully set a new precedent in America.”
theGRIO reported, Floyd was declared dead after Chauvin pressed his knee against his neck for 9 minutes, 29 seconds as Floyd lay face-down on the pavement, handcuffed and crying “I can’t breathe.”
An earlier report on theGRIO noted that Floyd died from a lack of oxygen, which damaged his brain and caused his heart to stop, a medical expert testified Thursday at Chauvin’s murder trial.
Floyd’s breathing was too shallow to take in enough oxygen while he was pinned facedown with his hands cuffed behind his back for 9 1/2 minutes as Chauvin knelt on his neck and back, said Dr. Martin Tobin, a lung and critical care specialist at the Edward Hines, Jr. VA Hospital and Loyola University’s medical school in Chicago. His testimony comes a day after a use-of-force expert testified that the now-fired white officer bore down with most of his weight on Floyd’s neck or neck area and his back the entire 9 1/2 minutes.
“For all those people that continue to say that this is such a difficult trial, that this is a hard trial, we refute that,” Crump told reporters during the trial last week. “We know that if George Floyd was a white American citizen, and he suffered this painful, tortuous death with a police officer’s knee on his neck, nobody, nobody, would be saying this is a hard case.”
Read More: Chauvin’s supervisor says restraint of George Floyd violated policies
Floyd was detained by Minneapolis Police officers after he attempted to use a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store.
Chauvin is charged with unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter. He has pleaded not guilty.
Bystander video of Floyd crying that he couldn’t breathe as onlookers yelled at Chauvin to get off him sparked protests and scattered violence around the U.S.
Clooney wrote an essay last summer in response the protests that was published by The Daily Beast.
“How many times have we seen people of color killed by police?” he wrote. “Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Laquan McDonald. There is little doubt that George Floyd was murdered. We watched as he took his last breath at the hands of four police officers. Now we see another defiant reaction to the systemic cruel treatment of a portion of our citizens like we saw in 1968, 1992, and 2014.”
“The anger and the frustration we see playing out once again in our streets is just a reminder of how little we’ve grown as a country from our original sin of slavery,” Clooney added. “The fact that we aren’t actually buying and selling other human beings anymore is not a badge of honor. We need systemic change in our law enforcement and in our criminal justice system. … This is our pandemic. It infects all of us, and in 400 years we’ve yet to find a vaccine.”
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