Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, fully sanitized from past domestic abuse allegations, appeared on “60 Minutes” to comment on the trial of former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin.
The lead prosecutor in the case, Ellison said he “felt a little bad” for the former cop, who was found guilty on all counts for the murder of George Floyd,
“I spent 16 years as a criminal defense lawyer, so I will admit I felt a little bad for the defendant,” he said. “I think he deserved to be convicted, but he’s a human being.”
At the same time, Ellison dismissed the entire premise behind the case, as portrayed by the media — that racial injustice was the driving factor.
CBS anchor Scott Pelley said that Chauvin’s motive for murdering Floyd remained a mystery, asking Ellison, “Was this a hate crime?”
“I wouldn’t call it that, because hate crimes are crimes where there’s an explicit motive of bias,” he said. “We don’t have any evidence that Derek Chauvin factored in George Floyd’s race as he did what he did.”
Pelley pointed out that Ellison did not charge Chauvin with a hate crime, even though Minnesota law allowed for it.
“Could have. But we only charge those crimes that we had evidence that we could put in front of a jury to prove,” Ellison responded. “If we’d have had a witness that told us that Derek Chauvin made a racial reference, we might’ve charged him with a hate crime. But I would have needed a witness to say that on the stand. We didn’t have it. So we didn’t do it.”
When confronted over the discrepancy, Ellison fell back on claims of systemic racism in America, as prescribed by the left’s toxic critical race theory, to suggest Chauvin’s actions were essentially racist because American society is racist.
“The whole world sees this as a white officer killing a black man because he is black, and you’re telling me that there’s no evidence to support that?” Pelley said.
“In our society, there is a social norm that killing certain kinds of people is more tolerable than other kinds of people,” Ellison opined. “In order for us to stop and pay serious attention to this case and be outraged by it, it’s not necessary that Derek Chauvin had a specific racial intent to harm George Floyd.”
He then applied racial motives to police officers who treat white professionals with more respect than a black suspect with a long criminal background, to include drug abuse, because the white suspect may have connections and lawyers.
Typical of the left, Ellison appears to only see skin color, ignoring that some suspects fail to comply with the lawful commands of police officers and violently resist attempts to be taken into custody.
“The fact is, we know, that through housing patterns, through employment, through wealth, through a whole range of other things, so often, people of color, black people, end up with harsh treatment from law enforcement,” he claimed. “And other folks doing the exact same thing just don’t. If an officer doesn’t throw a white neurologist in Eden Prairie, Minn., to the ground and doesn’t sit on top of his neck, is he doing it because this is a fellow white brother? No. He’s doing it because he thinks, ‘This is an important person, and if I treat them badly, somebody’s going to ask me about this. This person probably has lawyers. He probably knows the governor. He probably knows — he has connections. I can look at the way he’s dressed and the way he talks, that he’s probably, quote, unquote, ‘somebody’.’ And so, that’s really what it’s about.”
With misguided preconceptions like this, is America to expect that a former police officer who happens to be white and charged in the death of a black man can get a fair shake in Ellison’s jurisdiction?
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The longest-tenured writer at BizPac Review, Tom grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills.
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