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Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz suggested on “The Ingraham Angle” Friday that Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop accused of the death of George Floyd, cannot get a fair trial in the city after the judge in the case dismissed the defense appeals for a change of venue.
DERSHOWITZ: It’s a serious constitutional error. The judge focuses on the wrong issue: the issue of prejudice. What he should focus on is that jurors are going to be afraid that if they pass an acquittal or if they do not convict of murder, there may be violence. Their own homes, their own stores, their own families can be affected.
Not only is the thumb on the scale, but the elbow is on the scale. No juror should have to fear that in the event of an acquittal there will be consequences for them outside the courtroom. This is why this trial must be held in a rural area, far from places where there may be violence.
It should be postponed for several months and everything the accused might have known about the victim should be known to the jury. You have to see this case through the prism – through the eyes of the accused. If the defendant knew that he [Floyd] was violent, if he knew he was doing drugs, then that is permissible. If he didn’t know, then it’s a different theory.
My defense would be this: number one, knee on neck – although we now know that was wrong – was [police] politics in Minneapolis. Not only that, it has been used dozens of times and no one has ever died. Why did this person die? The defense would be, not because of the knee on the neck, but because of his pre-existing conditions, his high blood pressure, his medications in the body. This was the immediate cause and the best evidence for this is that the knee on the neck had been used in the past without any fatalities.
WATCH THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW HERE
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