How did courts and prosecutors treat George Floyd's prior offenses during the 2021 trial of Derek Chauvin?
Executive summary
The courtroom fight over George Floyd’s prior run‑ins with police was a tightly managed, contested sideline in the 2021 Derek Chauvin trial: judges largely excluded broad uses of Floyd’s past arrests as irrelevant or unfairly prejudicial, but allowed narrowly tailored evidence — most notably limited material from Floyd’s May 2019 arrest — when it met legal standards [1] [2]. Prosecutors resisted efforts by the defense to introduce a wider history of Floyd’s behavior or drug use, arguing such evidence would distract jurors from whether Chauvin’s force was reasonable; judges repeatedly enforced those limits to keep the focus on Chauvin’s conduct [3] [1].
1. The legal question: relevance versus prejudice
Before jurors walked in, Judge Peter Cahill had to apply evidentiary rules that balance probative value against unfair prejudice — a standard that shaped every dispute over Floyd’s past. Defense attorneys argued Floyd’s prior arrests and alleged drug use were relevant to causation and to whether he posed a threat during the May 25, 2020, encounter; prosecutors countered that most such history would only invite jurors to punish Floyd rather than assess Chauvin’s use of force, and Cahill excluded broad categories of prior‑act evidence accordingly [1] [3].
2. What the defense won: a narrow opening for the 2019 arrest
The defense secured permission to present limited evidence from Floyd’s May 2019 arrest — an incident in which he resisted officers and swallowed suspected drugs — after testing the connection to the SUV toxicology and potential medical explanations for his collapse, but the judge constrained how that story could be told to avoid overreaching implications [1]. That constrained admission was tactical: the court allowed only specific, corroborated facts tied to medical causation and toxicology rather than a sweeping character portrait of Floyd [1].
3. What the court excluded: most prior arrests and misconduct claims
Judges repeatedly excluded evidence of many other prior arrests and allegations about Floyd, and similarly limited the defense from painting George Floyd as a habitual drug abuser or violent person, reasoning jurors must decide whether Chauvin’s actions were reasonable in that moment, not punish Floyd for past conduct [3] [1]. The court’s approach tracked common trial practice: barring “other acts” evidence when it risks confusing or inflaming a jury more than it informs the central questions [3].
4. Prosecutors’ strategy: keep the focus on Chauvin’s conduct
Prosecutors pressed to keep trial evidence focused on Chauvin’s actions captured on video and expert testimony about restraint and causation; they moved to exclude collateral narratives about Floyd that could distract jurors. The state also sought an aggravated sentence by arguing Chauvin treated Floyd with “particular cruelty,” a judicial finding that later contributed to a longer sentence even while Floyd’s prior incidents were largely kept out of the jury’s deliberations [4] [5].
5. Limits on using Chauvin’s own past incidents as context
Parallel to disputes over Floyd’s record were fights over Chauvin’s prior conduct; the judge admitted only a couple of prior use‑of‑force incidents while excluding several others for lack of close similarity, a choice observers said protects the defendant from being tried for “bad character” rather than the charged killing [3] [2]. Federal investigators separately considered a 2017 incident in grand jury review, but those federal questions were handled outside the state trial’s evidentiary scope [6].
6. What this produced at trial and on appeal
The result was a trial where jurors saw limited context about Floyd’s past and substantial focus on the video, medical experts, and whether Chauvin’s restraint caused death; post‑trial appeals raised other complaints — including pretrial publicity and doctrinal questions — but appellate rulings largely upheld the convictions and sentence, not the defense’s evidentiary strategy to emphasize Floyd’s prior conduct [7] [8].