The policeman convicted of the murder of African-American George Floyd pleaded not guilty on Thursday to another case of violence he is accused of inflicting on a 14-year-old teenager in 2017.
Derek Chauvin, who is serving a 22-and-a-half-year sentence for suffocating the black forty-something, appeared by video before a federal judge in this separate case, but which bears disturbing similarities.
According to the indictment, the 45-year-old white agent, 19 of whom with the Minneapolis Police Department, violated the boy’s constitutional rights during his arrest in September 2017. “Without legal justification, he took the ‘teenager by the throat and repeatedly hit him on the head with a torch “, then” he kept his knee on the neck and upper back of the teenager lying face down, handcuffed and not offering no resistance, ”according to the document.
It was in the same posture that it was filmed on May 25, 2020, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck. The video, which went viral, had sparked huge protests against racism and police violence around the world.
Ahead of his trial in the State of Minnesota, local prosecutors had listed several arrests in which Derek Chauvin had exerted unreasonable pressure on the suspect’s neck, evidence according to them of a “modus operandi” .
None had previously been the subject of sanction or prosecution.
Derek Chauvin has never admitted his wrongs in the death of George Floyd, assuring to have followed the procedures in force in the police force to control a recalcitrant suspect.
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