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This is consensus building. [A jury convicted Chauvin of murder 2] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Derek_Chauvin). I am sure that his defense made pretty much the same arguments as you did, and obviously did not convince the jury.
Generally, you want to deter people from doing stuff which contributes to bad outcomes even when it is unclear if their contribution alone would have caused the bad outcome. If three people stab a victim and cause it to die from blood loss, we are not generally going to determine if the any of the assailants caused woulds which would have ensured death on their own, or if perhaps the victim might have survived if he had not taken an Asprin beforehand. Instead, we say that they all maliciously contributed in an attack which predictably resulted in death, so they are all murderers.
For Floyd, it seems plausible that Chauvin contributed to his death. He certainly acted with reckless disregard for his life. I do not give a rats as if his behavior was department policy, he can join the illustrious group of all the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg defense who were convicted despite claiming superior orders.
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I will grant you that the optics in the new case are almost as terrible as for Floyd. But while the police response was inappropriate in hindsight, it certainly lacks Chauvin's recklessness, the contribution to the death is less likely and there is a convenient guilty party on which to focus the ire.
Personally, I think that an absolute no-brainer would be to cancel the religious exemption to the laws forbidding knives. An openly carried weapon is a promise of violence. Religious exemptions are for stuff like keeping the sabbath or covering your hair on your passport photo, not for rules society really cares about, like bodily integrity of kids or public safety.
I'm sure Chauvin contributed to his death via arresting him for a crime which was very stressful for Floyd, but the position he placed him in was coached by department policy and you cannot choke somebody out over 8 minutes of them being able to talk in a position like that.
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That's not consensus building, that's genuinely how I view the situation. Juries make dumb decisions all the time. They're easy to manipulate. It's why Lee Kuan Yew did away with them in Singapore. But regardless, you should view a death by overdose helped along by negligence differently from a person stabbed to death.
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Reform UK have pledged to do exactly that if they achieve a majority in the next election. Strange that Labour haven't scooped them.
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Chauvin judged that Floyd was in a state of excited delerium and placed Floyd in the officially taught prone restraint position (ctrl-f “Minneapolis police training slide”) for cases of excited delerium. Restraining subjects in ExDS was department protocol. Actually there’s a recording of Chauvin and another officer articulating this, and that the reason they had him in this position was because of ExDS. And Floyd’s behavior was classic ExDS. You should probably care if Chauvin was performing departmental policy conscientiously because otherwise you’re punishing the innocent, which is 100x worse than failing to punish the guilty. Why would you want a police officer to be deciding on the fly a new restraint technique? He’s not an expert in restraint, and he’s not a medical expert, and he is being placed in an extremely high stress situation. Would you be okay with sending doctors to the Rape Dungeon if they prescribe something that is only proven to be deadly post-hoc?
I thought this was a fake thing cops made up. I'm sure their internal documentation refers to it and recommends methods of dealing with it. Pretending as though it was a medical diagnosis they are sensibly dealing with. That way when they get caught behaving in an unjustifiable manner they can use procedure as a shield from criticism. A procedure they made up and may not be legal if actually applied. As seen by this cop following procedure and then being convicted of murder.
Oh let me tell you, it's real, i've experienced it. It sucks a lot.
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The reason ExDS fell out of fashion is that it’s overwhelmingly a phenomenon of young black men on drugs. For progressives, this means it can’t possibly be real. But it’s possible that there is a rare gene that makes some populations violently resist confinement which, when in combination with certain drugs, results in a heart attack. Why would that be impossible? We can imagine that such an instinct would confer an evolutionary advantage in violent regions of the world and in regions which did not face cold winters where confinement and close proximity would have weeded such an instinct out. And indeed certain Arcticism theorists note that East Asians have 12x less claustrophobia than Arabs, a population with African admixture. So the mere fact that Blacks experience it more frequently is not actually valid grounds for the illegitimacy of the psychiatric state, though this is the primary reason why doctors have become uncomfortable with the syndrome / state / diagnosis.
Unfortunately, multiracial jury trials are a meme.
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That's a discussion for the police force policy manual though? Chauvin went to prison since the politics of the day demanded that he be railroaded. You can't do anything resembling state sanctioned violence if one can just arbitrarily toss out the official rules for use of force
Their policy manual and official department rules do not supercede the law. A cop can follow their procedure to the letter and also be convicted for his actions. Their procedures are something they made up and very much not the law.
We can have sanctioned violence with law enforcement follow the law rather than the "official rules" their department made. State legislation defining murder is not inferior to department policy.
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I think it's a term coined to describe a regularly observable phenomenon, rather than something with a specific, well-understood underlying medical theory. "Sometimes people go pants-shitting crazy when getting arrested, usually involving a novel cocktail of unknown drugs. How the fuck am I supposed to describe this in the reports?"
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The standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt", actually.
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