The guillotines are out.

     "Peter, this is French Revolution stuff. The left is eating its own. You need to be careful. Everyone needs to be careful."

               Guest Post: Anonymous

I had warned readers that a jury might find Derek Chauvin "not guilty." 

I got a warning in return. Don't dare suggest the possibility a reasonable, conscientious juror could consider Chauvin not guilty of a race-motivated homicide. 

On Saturday I wrote that the jurors might not convict the police officer whose knee was on the neck of George Floyd. A mid-career lawyer sent me the Guest Post below. It was less about the merits of the case than it was about the woke, politically engaged left. 

She said she thought she was a reliable liberal. She warned me about the Twitter mob. She had received some early warnings within her own workplace, a law firm that does substantial civil rights work. She is an associate on partner track. She warned that anything that did not seem sufficiently point-of-the-spear "woke" might garner accusations of closet racism and un-raised consciousness from young, very vigilant lawyers and staff. Their opinions matter because senior partners in her firm--and others like it--are loath to disagree or dismiss their comments lest they, too, face accusations. My correspondent says everyone walks on eggshells. What was commonplace to think and say five years ago will today get you knocked off partner track, or outright fired. Worse, you carry a stink that wrecks your career: Fired for being a racist. "You don't get over that," my correspondent said.

"Please don't use my name," she asked. "The guillotines are for us."

Guest Post by Anonymous

As a practicing attorney on the East Coast with substantial felony public defender experience, I can only post this anonymously due to the serious risks of cancel culture. It no longer makes any difference what a person's career or background has been in defending the oppressed, a single transgression of what we are all expected to say can destroy a career.  We are expected to say that it is 100% clear that the police officer who knelt on Mr. Floyd's neck is guilty of second degree murder and that only racist jurors in an institutionally racist criminal justice system could account for any verdict other than a guilty verdict for second degree murder. We are expected to proclaim that a verdict of only third degree murder, or worse second degree manslaughter, would be irrefutable evidence of a racist system. I note that one of your readers has already suggested that street violence might be appropriate if the officer is not convicted. 

However, most experienced criminal defenders and prosecutors believe that the case against the police officer is obviously weak from the publicly available evidence for the reasons you posted, and that the chances of the police officer getting a fair trial are very unlikely. The chances of a hung jury by one or two holdout jurors looms large. A complete acquittal seems almost impossible no matter the evidence. Of course, the only reason that the appeals court battle was waged by prosecutors over adding a third degree murder charge, called a "lesser included offense", is the belief by prosecutors that they don't have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer intentionally caused Mr. Floyd's death. Their hope is that juror holdouts on second degree murder can be pressured to at least convict on that lesser charge if for no reason other than to prevent Minneapolis from being burned down. The "lesser included offense" of second degree manslaughter is the prosecution's desperation card if they can't get the jury to conclude the officer acted "intentionally" to cause death. If there is just a manslaughter conviction or a hung jury, it will almost certainly be the end of the careers of the judge and prosecutors. Their chances of passing the political scrutiny for promotion to elevated judgeships and prosecutorial jobs would be nil.

Trial by mob and conviction by Twitter are alive and well in America in 2021. However, there is nothing new about media mobs in America history driven by public outrage demanding punishment no matter what. Thankfully, there is such a small number of these celebrated cases that they don't present a significant threat to regular order in the criminal justice system, which regularly convicts a small number of innocent defendants, even sentences them to death. 90% of criminal defendants plead guilty because they are guilty. Furthermore, there is a safeguard built into the appellate process-- delay and review by judges who have already reached the highest levels of their profession. If this police officer is wrongly convicted he has a good chance of having that conviction overturned within a couple of years by the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. By that time, the public passions of the moment will have been eclipsed by subsequent controversial police killings.   

What is new in American history is an electronic social media mob that can act instantaneously in passing judgments meting out severe career damage with little information beyond the tweets and posts they just read. In my world, I am expected to mimic a deeply held belief that the officer is guilty of intentional murder, before the trial even begins, and long before all the evidence is made public. What is new is the consensus that reasoned public debate based on the evidence is not just superfluous, but subversive.