The judges on the Minnesota Court of Appeals will soon be asking themselves the same question the jurors did in the third-degree
murder trial of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. Do I save Derek Chauvin? Or do I save my own ass?
The judges will inevitably have to consider the effects on the community’s well-being and on their own personal safety if they choose to overturn Chauvin’s conviction. The jurors could keep their fears to themselves. The judges will have to confront them head on. In his concise and passionate reply brief filed on Oct. 7, Chauvin attorney William F. Mohrman allows the judges little wiggle room. Says he bluntly and convincingly, “Chauvin did not receive due process.” There were many reasons why this was so. The one that jumps out at me was “the exclusion of the photo from the MPD training manual showing an officer doing exactly what Chauvin did.”
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