The Chauvin Show Trial and the State’s Crisis of Legitimacy

Deplorable Yankee · May 18, 2021

The Chauvin Show Trial and the State’s Crisis of Legitimacy

On Tuesday, April 20th, a Minneapolis jury found police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of three counts, including second-degree murder, in the death of George Floyd. The “trial” had the usual characteristics of a political show trial, including an automatic verdict of guilty, even though we still do not know whether Floyd died from officer Chauvin’s actions or because of Floyd’s combination of heart disease, breathing problems, and ingestion of both fentanyl and meth. In show trials, the facts don’t matter anyway.

The markers of a show trail include:

The President of the United States, Joe Biden, said publicly before the verdict that he was praying for “the right verdict.” Could anyone doubt what verdict he meant?
One defense witness had his former home vandalized, presumably by people who thought he still lived there. Witness intimidation, anyone? Hello?
The Left openly threatened riots unless the jury caved and voted Chauvin guilty. In a column in the Saturday-Sunday, April 24-25 Wall Street Journal, Joseph Perkins quoted Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who is black, saying in Minneapolis the weekend before the verdict, “I hope we get a verdict that says guilty, guilty, guilty. And if we don’t. . . we’ve got to stay on the street. We have to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational.” Perkins quoted attorney Alan Dershowitz saying Waters’ words were “an attempt to intimidate the jury,” which they certainly were in a city that had already suffered major riots over Floyd’s death.
In an editorial on April 21, the WSJ noted that, “Even after the verdict, commentators who applauded the jury gave last year’s riots in American cities the credit for inspiring it. Not the facts. Not the law.” If that doesn’t define a political show trial, Lavrentii Beria took in orphans’ washing.

Blatant show trials are a sign of a regime’s lack of legitimacy, not of its strength. They show a state is afraid of facts. Some of the facts those now running the executive and legislative branches of government fear are:

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