6:12 p.m. ET, June 25, 2021
Judge says Chauvin treated Floyd "without respect and denied him the dignity owed to all human beings"
From CNN's Aaron Cooper
In a 22-page memorandum, Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter Cahill explained his rational for sentencing former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin to 22 and a half years for the second-degree unintentional murder of George Floyd.
The sentence exceeds the Minnesota sentencing guideline range of 10 years and eight months to 15 years for the crime.
Cahill rejected a defense request for probation, citing reasons including “because a probationary sentence would be disproportionate and understate the severity of Mr. Chauvin’s offense.”
“Mr. Chauvin’s continuing insistence that he believed ‘he was simply performing his lawful duty in assisting other officers in the arrest of George Floyd’ and was acting “in good faith reliance [on] his own experience as a police officer and the training he had received… was rejected by every supervisory and training officer of the Minneapolis Police Department who testified at trial as well as by the jury,” Cahill wrote.
Cahill said two aggravating factors warranted the harsher sentence: Chauvin “abused his position of trust or authority” and treated Floyd with “particular cruelty.”
“These factual findings provide a ‘[s]ubstantial and compelling’ basis for an aggravated sentencing departure, because they demonstrate that Mr. Chauvin’s conduct ‘was significantly more . . . serious than that typically involved in the commission of the crime[s] in question,’” Cahill wrote citing prior cases. “’Defendant objectively remained indifferent to Mr. Floyd’s pleas’ even as ‘Mr. Floyd was begging for his life and obviously terrified by the knowledge that he was likely to die…’ Mr. Chauvin’s prolonged restraint of Mr. Floyd was also much longer and more painful than the typical scenario in a second-degree or third-degree murder or second-degree manslaughter case.”
Two other aggravating factors the court had earlier found were present in this incident, that children were at the scene of Floyd’s death and that the crime was committed by a group of officers, did not warrant an upwards sentencing departure, Cahill found.
“Mr. Chauvin, rather than pursuing the (Minneapolis Police Department) mission, treated Mr. Floyd without respect and denied him the dignity owed to all human beings and which he certainly would have extended to a friend or neighbor,” the judge concluded.
Under Minnesota law, Chauvin will have to serve two-thirds of his sentence in prison (15 years), and he will be eligible for supervised release for the other seven and a half years.