Federal prosecutors in Minnesota have hit back at Derek Chauvin , the former Minneapolis cop convicted of murdering George Floyd, for successfully motioning to get tests done on heart and fluid samples on file from Floyd’s autopsy, saying “it defies belief” that he’d ask.
“No legal basis exists for Defendant’s discovery requests,” prosecutors charged Tuesday in a motion to reconsider after U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson granted Chauvin’s legal team access to the samples a day earlier. “It defies belief that, if Defendant had been aware of a weaker medical defense theory than the one already rejected by his state jury, he would have chosen trial again, in the face of overwhelming evidence and a Guidelines sentence of life.”
Chauvin, 48, is looking to run tests on Floyd’s heart and fluid samples to see if it was a heart condition that ultimately led to his death and not Chauvin’s knee being on Floyd’s neck for more than 9 minutes, per prosecutors. His lawyers believe Floyd may have died due to a “catecholamine crisis when his paraganglioma secreted excessive levels of catecholamines,” according to the discovery motion filed by them on Dec. 13, with a “pulmonary edema” possibly being caused by Takotsubo’s myocarditis, which is described by Chauvin’s legal team as a type of a heart attack or acute heart failure.