Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Minneapolis to pay George Floyd’s family $27m in police custody death lawsuit

Introduction To This Series:

This post is one installment in an ongoing news series: a “living history” of the current national and international uprising for justice.

Today’s movement descends directly from the many earlier civil rights struggles against repeated injustices and race-based violence, including the killing of unarmed Black people. The posts in this series serve as a timeline of the uprising that began on May 26, 2020, the day after a Minneapolis police officer killed an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck. The viral video of Floyd’s torturous suffocation brought unprecedented national awareness to the ongoing demand to truly make Black Lives Matter in this country.

The posts in this series focus on stories of the particular killings that have spurred the current uprising and on the protests taking place around the USA and across the globe. Sadly, thousands of people have lost their lives to systemic racial, gender, sexuality, judicial, and economic injustice. The few whose names are listed here represent the countless others lost before and since. Likewise, we can report but a few of the countless demonstrations for justice now taking place in our major cities, small towns, and suburbs.

Minneapolis to pay George Floyd’s family $27m in police custody death lawsuit

City agrees to settle lawsuit with family during jury selection for trial of Derek Chauvin, former police officer charged with murder

By Amudalat Ajasa, The Guardian

March 12, 2021

The city of Minneapolis has agreed to pay $27m to settle a civil lawsuit with the family of George Floyd, even as jury selection was under way in the murder trial of the former police of the former police officer, Derek Chauvin, who killed him.

The city council unanimously approved the settlement on Friday. The council emerged from closed session to announce the move, which includes $500,000 for the neighborhood where Floyd was arrested.

The Floyd family attorney, Ben Crump, said in a prepared statement that it was the largest pre-trial civil rights settlement ever in a wrongful death lawsuit, and “sends a powerful message that Black lives do matter and police brutality against people of color must end”…

Floyd’s family filed the federal civil rights lawsuit in July against the city, Chauvin and three other fired officers charged in his death. It alleged the officers violated Floyd’s rights when they restrained him, and that the city allowed a culture of excessive force, racism and impunity to flourish in its police force…

Only one Minnesota police officer has been convicted a murder before, a Black officer who killed a white women, yet several hundred Minnesotans have suffered police-involved deaths in the last 20 years.

It was not immediately clear how the settlement might affect the trial or the jury now being seated to hear it. Joseph Daly, a professor emeritus at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, said it will be hard to stop jurors or potential jurors from hearing about it…

Meanwhile, with jury selection in its fourth day, sevenpeople have been seated so far, with the jury roughly balanced between white people and people of color, according to the authorities.

Opening statements are expected around 29 March.

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