Minnesota [US], August 8 : Tou Thao, a former police officer who held back onlookers while other officers restrained George Floyd, was given a four-year, nine-month state prison sentence by a judge in Minneapolis. In May, Thao's second-degree manslaughter involvement in Floyd's death was judged to be guilty of her involvement. According to a report in the New York Times, this is the last sentence for Floyd's murder.
Floyd, a 46-year-old Black male, was taken into custody by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020, after a store clerk reported that Floyd had purchased smokes using a fake USD 20 bill. For more than nine minutes, Floyd was restrained in handcuffs and held down by Officer Derek Chauvin's knee. According to The New York Times, Thao kept onlookers who were concerned about Floyd's condition at bay while two other officers held Floyd down.
The county medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, saying in his testimony that the compression of Floyd’s neck and the restraint of his body by officers was the main cause of his death.
The killing of Floyd was captured on video by bystanders and quickly went viral. The video incited protests across the United States against police brutality and systemic racism that evolved into a global movement for racial justice, The New York Times reported.
The day after Floyd’s death, the Minneapolis Police Department fired all four of the officers involved. They were all later charged and convicted of a variety of crimes. Each was sentenced to several years in prison, with Chauvin carrying the heaviest sentence, more than 20 years in both federal and state prison.
The City of Minneapolis agreed to pay USD 27 million to Floyd’s family, after the family sued the city, saying that the police had violated his rights, The New York Times reported.
In 2021 a state jury found Chauvin guilty of second and third-degree murder, as well as second-degree manslaughter for the killing of Floyd. He was sentenced to 22 and a half years in state prison.
A year later, Chauvin was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to violating the constitutional rights of Floyd and a 14-year-old boy, who is also Black and was injured in a similar but unrelated encounter.
Chauvin’s federal and state sentences are being served concurrently, and he is incarcerated at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, Ariz, The New York Times reported.
Chauvin appealed the murder conviction, arguing that he had been deprived of a fair trial for several reasons, including the district judge’s decision not to move the trial out of Minneapolis. Several months ago, a Minnesota appeals court upheld Chauvin’s conviction.
In May, he asked the Minnesota Supreme Court to review his murder conviction, but the court declined to hear the case.
Thomas Lane, the officer who held down Floyd’s legs, pleaded guilty to a state charge of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter in May 2022. Lane was also convicted in federal court of violating Floyd’s rights. He is concurrently serving two sentences, for two and a half years and three years, at a federal prison in Colorado.
J. Alexander Kueng, the officer who helped to pin down Floyd including by kneeling on Floyd’s torso, was convicted in federal court in February 2022 of violating Floyd’s constitutional rights. Kueng pleaded guilty to state charges of manslaughter in October. He is concurrently serving a three-year sentence and a three-and-a-half-year sentence, The New York Times reported.
The fourth officer, Thao is serving a three-and-a-half-year federal sentence after being convicted of depriving Floyd of his right to medical care and for failing to intervene.
In May, after waiving his right to a jury trial, a judge in Minneapolis ruled that Thao was guilty of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter. Thao was sentenced to four years and nine months in state prison on Monday. He will serve the state sentence concurrently with his federal sentence.
Thao appealed his federal convictions, but last week an appellate court denied his appeal and upheld the conviction.
After Floyd’s death, Minnesota’s Department of Human Rights conducted an investigation and found that the Minneapolis Police Department had routinely engaged in racially discriminatory policing and had failed to punish officers for misconduct. City officials agreed to make sweeping changes in policing, The New York Times reported.
This year, the Justice Department released a scathing report from a multiyear investigation into the department, finding that it frequently discriminated against Black and Native American people and that it used deadly force without justification, among other things.
In response, Minneapolis officials said they would work with the federal government to negotiate a consent decree that would overhaul the police force.
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