George Floyd’s Heart Tissue To Be Tested In New Appeal Attempt
A judge has granted permission for tests to be performed on George Floyd’s heart tissue as a result of a conviction appeal attempt from former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
In November 2023, Chauvin’s legal team filed a motion to vacate the federal charges related to Floyd’s death in May 2020 after the disgraced law enforcement officer claimed he wouldn’t have pleaded guilty if he knew more about some theories presented by Kansas pathologist Dr. William Schaetzel.
Schaetzel believes that Chauvin’s actions didn’t cause the Minneapolis native’s death. The health professional theorized that Floyd died due to a high level of catecholamines, a neurohormone correlated to stress response, in association with the flight-or-fight response — or Takotsubo myocarditis, a heart condition. This heart condition is an intense emotional or physical experience.
The theory put Chauvin’s lawyer at the time, Eric Nelson, in a tough spot, accusing him of offering ineffective counsel by failing to inform his client of this information and not successfully securing test samples of the deceased heart, which doctors allegedly recommended. “Given the significant nature of the criminal case that Mr. Chauvin was convicted of, and given that the discovery that Mr. Chauvin seeks could support Dr. Schaetzel’s opinion of how Mr. Floyd died, the Court finds that there is good cause to allow Mr. Chauvin to take the discovery that he seeks,” U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson wrote in an order on Dec. 16, according to Newsweek.
With this new motion, attorneys will be allowed to examine slides and pictures of Floyd’s heart, along with tissue samples and blocks holding heart tissue. Court documents also reveal that fluids from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office can also be taken to test the “concentration of fractionated catecholamines and metanephrine levels present.”
Floyd’s death sparked international outrage when bystanders recorded Officer Chauvin, a white man, kneeling on the neck of the victim, who was Black, for over nine minutes. Floyd was heard yelling the now infamous phrase, “I can’t breathe,” giving birth to a renewed Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and protests across state lines.
Since his conviction in 2022, Chauvin has simultaneously served a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights and a 22 1/2-year state sentence for second-degree murder. The new motion is one of several attempts from Chauvin to have his convictions overturned.
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