Police involved in the death of George Floyd are appearing in Minneapolis court on Monday for the first substantive hearing into the murder of this African-American who reopened racial wounds in the United States.
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Former white agent Derek Chauvin, 44, will be heard from 5.15 p.m. GMT via video link from the high-security prison where he is detained. He is charged with murder for asphyxiating George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by kneeling on his neck for long minutes.
Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao, accused of being an accomplice to the murder, should be present in person. The first two were released on bail on bail of $ 750,000.
The four could take advantage of the hearing to say whether they plead guilty or not guilty. They face up to 40 years in prison. The question of whether they will be tried together or separately could also be addressed.
On May 25, they wanted to arrest George Floyd suspected of having tried to sell a counterfeit 20 dollar bill in a business in Minneapolis, in the northern United States. The man in his forties, handcuffed, was pressed to the ground and Constable Derek Chauvin applied his knee to his neck to keep him there.
“I can’t breathe,” pleaded George Floyd several times before he lost consciousness. Despite the interventions of passers-by, Derek Chauvin continued to exert pressure.
The drama, whose images captured by a passer-by went viral, sparked a wave of unprecedented protests since the great civil rights marches of the 1960s, which even went beyond American borders.
The anger in the street rose quickly, because, at first, the justice system had been slow to react. The police immediately dismissed the four men, but the local prosecutor in charge of the case had only arrested Derek Chauvin four days after the facts and only charged him with “manslaughter”, without questioning his colleagues.
The file was then removed and placed directly with the Minnesota State Attorney. An autopsy then confirmed that George Floyd had died “by homicide” because of “the pressure on his neck” and the charges against Derek Chauvin had been reclassified as “murder”. His three colleagues were arrested and charged in turn for “complicity”.
Despite family relief, protests continued across the United States.
Processions mingled with calls to reform the police, end inequality between black and white Americans, and take on the country’s racist and slavery past.
This pressure has borne fruit: several police services have renounced the “bottlenecks”, others have committed themselves to make the liabilities of their agents public or to exclude the powerful unions from disciplinary proceedings. Minneapolis City Council even decided to dismantle its police to reinvent new law enforcement.
But at the federal level, progress is more timid. Republican President Donald Trump, campaigning for his re-election, has focused on the excesses committed on the margins of the demonstrations to pose as guarantor of “law and order”.
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