An insider’s look at the George Floyd murder trial

The country was in turmoil for three weeks in 2021 during the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin as a jury in Minneapolis questioned whether George Floyd’s death was murder. Through it all, Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Attorney General who led the prosecution, was a constant but silent presence in the courtroom.

During the proceedings, he wrote in old notebooks he had kept from his days in Congress. When he ran out, a friend who worked for a law firm gave him more notebooks. He filled that too.

“I wasn’t trying to be a stenographer,” Mr Ellison, 59, said in an interview this month. “I thought, ‘What should I remember?'”

Those notes informed the prosecution’s nightly meetings during the trial. But they also formed the basis for Mr. Ellison’s new book, “Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence,” which will be published by Twelve on Tuesday. It’s a trial diary of sorts, a clear, methodical record of his experience leading the prosecution of Mr. Chauvin, in the rare murder conviction of a police officer for death in the line of duty.

The book documents a case that was both a groundbreaking national trial and a return to Mr. Ellison’s early roots as a civil rights attorney in Minnesota, where he studied law. In 2006, Mr. Ellison entered the national scene and became the first Muslim chosen to Congress, where he served six terms as part of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He continued his rise in national politics as Deputy Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, but returned to where his career began in 2018, winning election as Minnesota Attorney General.

He had been in office less than two years when the governor of Minnesota took the unusual step of appointing him Mr. Ellison to lead prosecution of the Chauvin case.

In the days after the jury found guilty on two counts of murder and manslaughter, Mr. Ellison was bombarded with calls from prosecutors across the country seeking his advice in handling cases of police misconduct. When he started writing the book, he hoped to produce simply: a document that could be both a historical account and a guide for officials when faced with a case of police misconduct.

“Honestly, I don’t think you can really solve a problem unless you prosecute criminal conduct and acquit misconduct,” Mr. Ellison said. “I think you have to have a reaction or you just won’t stop having this problem.”

Mr. Ellison said he worked on the book early in the morning, usually at five in the morning, the only time he could spare. Some days, he said, he didn’t write a single sentence and struggled to put his memories and experiences into words. On other days, paragraphs poured out as he wrote for hours, stopping at 8 a.m. for his work day.

For Mr. Ellison, the Chauvin case was a high-profile trial that returned him to the national spotlight, but it was far from his first civil rights experience.

As a young lawyer in Minneapolis, he represented the mother of Tycel Nelson, a teenager who was shot and killed by a police officer, and helped her win a civil settlement. Mr. Ellison became known as an early advocate of community-based policing long before the idea became popular nationwide.

But he has also drawn criticism for moving further to the left than some of his fellow Democrats, particularly for his support of an effort in the months since Mr Floyd’s death to replace the troubled Minneapolis police force with a new police force. department of public security. Amid mounting concerns about crime, that effort failed at the polls.

When he took on Mr Chauvin’s prosecution, the case was seen as an outlier, as the deaths of civilians by on-duty police officers are rarely prosecuted in the United States. Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, early Mr. Ellison to lead the prosecution in place of the local attorney, saying Mr. Ellison, who had close ties to Minneapolis racial justice advocates, was needed for the case.

In the book, Mr. Ellison describes the challenge handed to him, noting that in many cases—including the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers—the officers involved were acquitted. While there was overwhelming evidence in favor of the prosecution in the Chauvin case, including extensive mobile video footage of Mr. Floyd’s death, Mr. Ellison did not find the case easy to win. “I knew the video wasn’t a magic wand,” he writes in the forthcoming book.

Mr. Ellison wrote extensively about the jury selection process, one of the prosecution’s greatest challenges. They hoped for a jury that offered diversity of race as well as life experience: a prospective juror, a middle-aged white man, Mr. Ellison wrote, seemed “a nice man, a hard-working fellow,” but unaware of the changing circumstances the country. , complicated cultures.

Prosecutors used one of their strikes to remove him from the jury. “We needed people who would accept our theory in the case,” Mr Ellison said in an interview. “And if you’re consciously unaware of the American cultural landscape, it’s easy for you to say, ‘Well, I don’t know anyone like that. So it’s not like that.’”

The jury chosen was a mix of men and women, black, white and multiracial: “the most diverse jury I had ever assembled,” he wrote.

As the jury concluded its deliberations and Mr. Ellison began to receive word that a verdict had been reached, he was torn between confidence and uncertainty. After the guilty verdicts were read, he wrote, he felt relieved.

Later, Mr. Ellison was reminded of his own vulnerability. During his re-election campaign last November, when crime became the defining factor and Mr. Ellison was criticized from the right, he almost lost.

His margin of victory was just over 20,000 votes, from nearly 2.5 million votes cast, an even closer race than his first election four years earlier.