Archives for April 2021

CHICAGO (AP) — The attorney for the former officer charged with killing George Floyd says several studies suggest police can safely use their bodyweight to hold a handcuffed suspect facedown on the ground — or prone — as Floyd was in the last minutes of his life.

But those findings aren’t universally accepted and have been contradicted by a parade of law enforcement and medical experts central to prosecutors’ efforts to convict Derek Chauvin of murder and manslaughter.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT FLOYD’S POSITION?

Bystander and surveillance camera video shows Floyd on his stomach with his hands cuffed behind his back, pinned to the ground by three officers.

Chauvin was closest to Floyd’s head, and a use-of-force expert testified that Chauvin applied pressure to Floyd’s neck area for 9 minutes, 29 seconds.

Defense attorney Eric Nelson suggested Chauvin’s knee was not on Floyd’s neck for that entire time, but moved to his upper back, shoulder blades and arm.

WHAT DID PROSECUTORS’ EXPERTS SAY ABOUT THE PRONE POSITION?

Medical experts testified for the prosecution that the prone position cuts lung volume, reduces oxygen levels and makes it harder to breathe.

They also pointed to Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck, his body being pressed against the hard asphalt and his head being turned to the side as factors that prevented Floyd from breathing, resulting in his death.

WHAT RESEARCH IS THE DEFENSE USING?

Nelson leaned on studies conducted by doctors at the University of California San Diego that concluded prone positions are not inherently risky.

Prosecutors showed jurors one photo of participants in a 2013 study laid on their stomach on a gymnastics mat, hands and feet tied together behind them. A disc-shaped weight rests on a towel covering one of the 25 volunteer’s bare back while researchers monitored the effect on his heart.

The researchers acknowledged that limitations included the generally healthy volunteers between the ages of 22 and 42 and the study’s controlled environment. They tested weights totaling 50 and 100 pounds (23 and 46 kilograms) and acknowledged it’s “possible larger amounts of force are used in actual practice in the field.” The source of the study’s funding was not provided.

A spokeswoman for UC San Diego Health on Wednesday said the researchers declined to speak with The Associated Press about their work and its role in the trial.

A retired medical examiner testifying for the defense, Dr. David Fowler, also described a Canadian law enforcement study on the use of prone positioning during arrests; it found no fatalities among about 3,000 arrests. That information was provided by police officers and the Canadian government paid for the research.

The study’s authors said they didn’t know how long officers held suspects in the prone position or whether the officers used their bodyweight to hold them down.

WHAT DO CRITICS SAY?

Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina, said he has testified opposite the authors of several of the studies referenced during Chauvin’s trial. Alpert considers them flawed recreations of interactions between police and citizens.

He said police agencies have adopted training that recommends limiting the amount of time someone spends in the prone position — a clear sign that it is dangerous.

The U.S. Department of Justice warned agencies of the risks more than 25 years ago. Among the recommendations in that 1995 bulletin: “As soon as the suspect is handcuffed, get him off his stomach.”

Alpert recalled the words of a police trainer in Florida: “The ground is your friend and then it becomes angry.”

Minneapolis committed to training officers on the dangers of positional asphyxia in a $3 million settlement following the 2010 death of David Smith, whom officers subdued with a Taser and pinned face down for minutes.

Dr. Steven Bird, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, said restraining and weighing down volunteers is “completely different” to police holding handcuffed suspects to the ground.

“You can’t do a study that would adequately recapitulate the circumstances under which the patient died in restraint,” he said.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Legal experts say the case against Chauvin boils down to two questions: Did his actions cause Floyd’s death? Were those actions reasonable?

Nelson says Chauvin did what he was trained to do and that Floyd’s drug use and underlying health conditions caused his death. He’s hoping jurors will agree the research supports those arguments.

But several prosecution experts testified that Floyd died due to lack of oxygen because of how the officers were holding him down. Even the Minneapolis Police Department’s chief said Floyd should not have been pinned to the pavement for 9 1/2 minutes. Police officials also said Minneapolis officers are trained to turn suspects on their sides once handcuffed to ease breathing.

One use-of-force expert said no “reasonable” officer would have done what Chauvin did.

HOW ARE PROSECUTORS HANDLING THE RESEARCH?

Dr. Martin Tobin, a lung and critical care specialist at the Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital and Loyola University’s medical school in Illinois who was called as a witness by the prosecution, testified that the research involving weights on volunteers’ backs “highly misleading.”

The force of an officer’s knee, Tobin said, is 10 times greater than a large, flat weight spread over a volunteer’s upper back, and no study has pressed a weight onto someone’s neck.

“I suspect you’d have major trouble getting that through the ethics committee in any medical school,” Tobin said.

Prosecutor Jerry Blackwell on Wednesday aggressively questioned the studies’ relevance to Floyd’s experience, getting Fowler, the former medical examiner, to acknowledge that the research did not examine the effect of a knee pressing into someone’s neck or keep weight on subjects for the same length of time Floyd was kept on the ground.

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Find AP’s full coverage of the death of George Floyd at: https://apnews.com/hub/death-of-george-floyd

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UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege warned Wednesday that the scourge of sexual violence and rape in all conflicts is now “a real pandemic” and without sanctions and justice for the victims these horrific acts won’t stop.

The Congolese doctor told the U.N. Security Council in a video briefing that “we are still far away from being able to draw a red line against the use of rape and sexual violence as a strategy of war domination and terror.”

Mukwege appealed to the international community “to draw a red line against the use of rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war.” And he stressed that the “red line” must mean “blacklists with economic, financial and political sanctions as well as judicial prosecutions against the perpetrators and instigators of these egregious crimes.”

Mukwege founded the Panzi Hospital in the eastern Congo city of Bukavu, and for over 20 years has treated countless women who were raped amid fighting between armed groups seeking control of some the central African nation’s vast mineral wealth. He lamented that sexual violence and impunity continue.

He shared the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize with activist Nadia Murad, who was kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery by Islamic State militants in 2014 along with an estimated 3,000 Yazidi girls and women.

Mukwege said there has been progress in international law, and the greatest challenge today is to transform commitments into obligations, and Security Council resolutions into results. Accountability and justice “are the best tools of prevention,” he said, and without punishment and sanctions, rapes and sexual violence in conflicts will continue.

Mukwege spoke at a council meeting on Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ latest report on sexual violence in conflict which said the COVID-19 pandemic led to a spike in gender-based violence last year. It focused on 18 countries where the U.N. said it has verified information that 52 warring parties are “credibly suspected” of patterns of “rape and other forms of sexual violence” in conflicts on the council agenda. The majority of the parties are opposition, rebel and terrorist groups — so-called “non-state actors” — and over 70 percent “are persistent perpetrators.”

In the latest example, Pramila Patten, the U.N. special representative on conflict-related sexual violence, told the council that right now in Ethiopia’s remote, mountainous regions of north and central Tigray, where fighting continues between the government and the region’s fugitive leaders, “women and girls are being subjected to sexual violence with a level of cruelty beyond comprehension.”

“Health care workers are documenting new cases of rape and gang-rape daily, despite their fear of reprisals and attacks on the limited shelters and clinics in operation,” Patten said, noting that the report records allegations of over 100 rape cases since fighting began in November but it may take months to determine the full scale and magnitude of the atrocities.

She said the report documents “over 2,500 U.N.-verified cases of conflict-related sexual violence committed in the course of 2020,” including in Congo, Central African Republic, Libya and South Sudan’s western Darfur region.

“Each of these cases cries out for justice,” Patten said. “It is time to write a new social contract in which no military or political leader is above the law, and no woman or girl is beneath the scope of its protection.”

Caroline Atim, director of the South Sudan Women with Disabilities Network who represented non-governmental organizations focused on women, peace and security, became the first deaf person to brief the Security Council. She used sign language for her remarks which were voiced by an interpreter.

Despite a 2018 peace deal, Atim said, “South Sudan remains engulfed by intercommunal, ethnic, political and armed conflicts where gender-based violence is deliberately used as a tool of humiliation against women and girls.”

“More than 65% of South Sudanese women have experienced sexual or physical violence, a figure that is double the global average and among the highest in the world,” she said, echoing calls for a halt to sexual violence, a survivor-centered approach for victims, and accountability for perpetrators.

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