President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice stepped in this week to try to stop former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin‘s legal team from an appeal effort.
As highlighted by The Daily Wire, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Magnuson on Monday approved the examination of George Floyd’s heart tissue and bodily fluids, paving a way for an appeal from Chauvin, who was found guilty in the contentious and highly-publicized case concerning Floyd’s death.
Now, prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota are trying to reverse that ruling, Fox News reported. In a motion filed Tuesday, the state is arguing that Chauvin has “no legal basis for [his] discovery requests, all of which stem solely from an email he received from an unvetted doctor offering a weaker version of the medical defense than the version that the jury had previously rejected at his state trial.”
A day earlier, a motion filed by Chauvin’s new defense attorney, Robert Meyers, asked Judge Magnuson to explore samples taken during Floyd’s autopsy on the basis that Chauvin was given “ineffective assistance of counsel” under his last attorney, Eric Nelson.
Meyers noted that Dr. William Schaetzel, a Kansas-based forensic pathologist, told Nelson before conviction that he believed Floyd died from heart failure due to an excessive release of catecholamines, not from Chauvin’s actions, ABC5 reported. However, Nelson never discussed this with Chauvin.
Judge Magnuson agreed, writing in his order, “Nelson provided ineffective assistance of counsel to Mr. Chauvin by failing to consult with him on this issue.”
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Floyd, who suffered from heart disease and hypertension and had fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system at the time of his death, did not die until he was at a nearby hospital.
Chauvin, who has already been stabbed in prison, has been trying to appeal the conviction.
In 2023, attorney William Mohrman filed an appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing, in part, that Chauvin was denied the right to a fair trial. However, the high court refused to hear the appeal.
“Under the Sixth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution, every criminal defendant is guaranteed a right to a fair trial,” Mohrman told The Daily Wire at the time. “And part of that fair trial right is not to be tried in a location where the jurors have either been exposed to extensive pre-trial publicity, or there has been such community outrage and the like that the jurors, before they even were impaneled before the trial, would have concluded the defendant’s guilty, or would have been pressured into rendering a guilty verdict.”
Related: Chauvin’s Legal Team Allowed Avenue For Appeal, Will Examine George Floyd’s Heart Tissue
