Former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin was reportedly stabbed in prison by another inmate on Friday, resulting in serious injury.
Chauvin was found guilty in the contentious and highly-publicized case concerning the death of George Floyd and is currently serving a 20-plus year sentence for second-degree murder.
The Bureau of Prisons confirmed that an inmate was assaulted at Federal Correctional Institution, Tucson — a medium-security prison — at 12:30 p.m. on Friday. Responding employees at the prison “contained the incident and performed ‘life-saving measures'” before the inmate was transferred to a local hospital for further treatment and evaluation, the Associated Press reported Friday.
The bureau did not name the inmate in the incident, but a source told the AP that Chauvin was the victim in the attack, adding that he was stabbed during the assault.
In the aftermath of the attack, the prison has stopped visitations to the facility, which has reportedly been plagued by staffing shortages and security lapses.
Eric Nelson, Chauvin’s attorney, argued last year that his client “spends much of his time in solitary confinement, largely for his own protection,” suspecting Chauvin would be a target due to the “intense publicity surrounding his case.”
Earlier this year, attorney William Mohrman filed an appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Chauvin, arguing, in part, that his client was denied the right to a fair trial. However, last week, the high court decided to decline to hear the appeal.
Videos of Floyd’s detainment on the ground by Chauvin went viral in 2020, sparking protests and riots across the U.S. and even Europe. Mohrman argued that holding the trial in Minneapolis, where the incident occurred, effectively guaranteed Chauvin an unfair trial.
“Under the Sixth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution, every criminal defendant is guaranteed a right to a fair trial,” the attorney told The Daily Wire via a phone interview. “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.”
“When that happens,” Mohrman said, “the Supreme Court precedents require that the case be moved to another location or venue, as the law puts it.” But this is not what happened in Chauvin’s case.
“During the questioning, I would say the vast majority — not only the vast majority, probably 75 to 80 percent of the jurors — expressed concerns for their own personal safety as a result of being impaneled on the jury,” he said. “Virtually every juror had obviously heard about the case, knew about the riots, had seen the videos that were taken when George Floyd was arrested; virtually all the jurors have seen that, so it’s difficult in a case like that to impanel the jury where the jurors haven’t formed firm conclusions before the trial even starts.”
Mohrman noted that the legal team’s “primary argument” is that “due to the riots that took place in Minneapolis, every juror who was impaneled had a stake in the outcome of the trial, because no juror would want to see their communities burned again in riots.”
CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP
There is also a Federal Civil Rights conviction against Chauvin, for which he is serving over 20 years concurrently with his state sentence. Challenging that conviction is a separate legal action.