Minnesota’s attorney general is pushing back on calls for President Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the white police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020.
Speaking on CNN on Thursday, Keith Ellison said such calls show a “blatant disrespect” for the law and for Floyd’s family.
“I hope that Donald Trump has enough humanity to recognize that releasing Derek Chauvin would cause untold injury to George Floyd’s family and the many many people that feel vulnerable because they share experiences like the one George Floyd experienced,” said Ellison, a Democrat.
In April 2021, Chauvin was convicted on state charges of third-degree murder, second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to 22 and a half years behind bars, to be served concurrently with his federal sentence of 252 months.
On Tuesday, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro called for Trump to pardon Chauvin of his federal charges.
“It would be incredibly controversial but I think incredibly necessary,” Shapiro said on his podcast.
He added that Chauvin’s pardon would reverse “the evils of the last years in American life.”
“There is a man was rotting in prison because the media decided in the middle of 2020 that they were going to turn a tragic law enforcement stop that ended with the death of a man with a significant problem with drugs and pre-existing health problems into the raison d’être of the entire 2020 election, and it led to vast chaos, it led to, again, the destruction of racial comity in the United States, $2 billion in property damage and a guy rotting in prison who the evidence demonstrates certainly was not guilty beyond reasonable doubt in that case,” Shapiro said.
Chauvin’s violent arrest of Floyd was caught on camera and circulated widely on social media.
The video showed the former officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes and refusing to get up even as Floyd repeatedly said he could not breathe.
Floyd’s killing sparked global protests, many highlighting the disproportionate impact police brutality has on Black Americans as they demanded police reform.
Shortly after Shapiro posted his clip with a link to a petition calling for the pardon, tech billionaire and Trump advisor Elon Musk retweeted the video with the caption, “Something to think about.”
Ellison vehemently pushed back on the calls for Chauvin’s pardon.
“It would set us back as a society. We took great steps forward,” Ellison said, adding that many of the 18,000 police departments around the nation have “worked to improve police community relationships.”
“Police departments depend on trust and Derek Chauvin destroyed that trust,” Ellison said. “They’ve been trying to rebuild it, so it is actually really hurting law enforcement, because what you’re saying is good conduct, bad conduct, it doesn’t matter. You get to murder people if you want to. And so for every chief and every police officer out there striving to make a better department with a better relationship with their community, it is a spit in the face of them, too.”
