A judge's assertion that there is no evidence that four girls were traumatized by witnessing George Floyd's murder last year is being challenged by the Minnesota Attorney General's Office, which prosecuted the case.
Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a letter with the court late Wednesday asking Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill to delete portions of a June 25 document he filed in the case outlining his thought process for sentencing former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to 22 ½ years in prison for Floyd's murder.
Jurors convicted Chauvin on April 20 of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter for killing Floyd on May 25, 2020. Cahill sentenced him June 25.
Ellison criticized Cahill for apparently dismissing the trauma suffered by the girls; three were 17 and one was 9 at the time.
"The Court should remove or modify the identified portions of the opinion," Ellison wrote in the letter made public Thursday morning. "Doing so will not, in any way, affect Defendant's 22.5 year sentence but will avoid the risk of sending the message that the pain these young women endured is not real or does not matter, or worse, that it's a product of their own decisions and not a consequence of Defendant's."
Cahill had written in his sentencing memorandum that three of the girls smiled and laughed during the encounter. The three included Judeah Reynolds, who was 9 at the time, and her cousin, Darnella Frazier, who was 17 and whose cellphone recording of the incident sparked the criminal case. The cousins had walked to Cup Foods to buy candy when they came upon the scene.
"Although the State contends that all four of these young women were traumatized by witnessing this incident, the evidence at trial did not present any objective incident of trauma," Cahill wrote.
Ellison wrote that the girls were traumatized even if their behavior did not appear to indicate trauma and that research shows a bias that casts Black girls in a more adult light. Frazier and Reynolds are Black, as was Floyd.