A judge who presided over the George Floyd’s murder case, at a resumed hearing on Thursday, granted the prosecutor’s request to reinstate the third-degree murder charge against the Ex-Minneapolis Police officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck.
The third-degree murder charge was reinstated by a Hennepin County Judge, Peter Cahill.
The charge was initially rejected in October, as it was not warranted by the circumstances of George Floyd’s murder. But an appellate court ruling in an unrelated case established new grounds for it.
According to the report by Associated Press (AP), Chauvin already faced second-degree murder and manslaughter charges. Legal experts say the additional charge helps prosecutors by giving jurors one more option to convict Chauvin of murder.
The dispute over the third-degree murder charge revolved around the conviction of another former Minneapolis police officer in the unrelated killing of an Australian woman. The appeals court recently affirmed Mohamed Noor’s third-degree murder conviction in the 2017 shooting death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, and the state used that affirmation to argue that it established new justification for the charge in Chauvin’s case.
Cahill agreed that the precedent has now been established.
“I feel bound by that and I feel it would be an abuse of discretion not to grant the motion,” he said.
Floyd was declared dead on May 25 after Chauvin, who is white, pressed his knee against the Black man’s neck for about nine minutes.
George Floyd’s murder sparked sometimes violent protests in Minneapolis and beyond, leading to a nationwide reckoning on race.