A Minnesota judge has sentenced former police officer Derek Chauvin to 22 years and six months in prison on Friday for the murder of George Floyd during an arrest in May 2020 on a Minneapolis footpath, video of which sparked global protests.
This grab from video shows former policeman Derek Chauvin speaking facing the camera as he heard his sentence in the Hennepin County Government Center on June 25, 2021 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
A jury found Chauvin, 45, guilty on April 20 of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter after a trial that was widely seen as a watershed moment in the history of US policing.
Prosecutors had asked for a 30-year prison sentence, double the upper limit indicated in sentencing guidelines for a first-time offender. The defence had asked for probation.
Video of Chauvin, who is white, kneeling on the neck of Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man in handcuffs, for more than nine minutes caused outrage around the world and the largest protest movement seen in the United States in decades.
In a sentencing memorandum, prosecutors from the Minnesota attorney general’s office wrote that Chauvin’s crime “shocked the conscience of the nation.”
In a six-page ruling last month, Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill found that prosecutors had shown there were four aggravating factors that would allow him to hand down a longer prison term than sentencing guidelines would dictate.
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