Chauvin judge declines state's request to revise memo about young eyewitnesses to Floyd's murder

The Hennepin County judge who oversaw the trial of ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd rebuffed on Tuesday the state's request to delete comments from his sentencing memorandum about whether four young eyewitnesses were traumatized at the murder scene.

Judge Peter Cahill opened his 10-page response by saying he no longer has jurisdiction over the Chauvin case, having sentenced him last month to 22½ years for Floyd's murder. But the judge wrote that the "tone and substance" of the letter from Attorney General Keith Ellison's office "necessitate a response."

The judge said the state "misperceives" what should be its focus: Chauvin's conduct toward Floyd on May 25, 2020, that resulted in convictions of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Cahill also noted that he "neither found nor wrote" that the four minor girls who witnessed Floyd's murder "were not traumatized. What the court wrote is that 'the evidence at trial did not present any objective indicia of trauma.' "

Last week, Ellison's office filed a letter asking Cahill to delete portions of his sentencing memorandum. The attorney general criticized Cahill for apparently dismissing the trauma endured by the four.

Three female eyewitnesses to Floyd's murder were 17 at the time, including Darnella Frazier, whose cellphone recording posted to social media prompted the criminal investigation. Frazier's 9-year-old cousin Judeah Reynolds, who had accompanied her to Cup Foods for snacks, stood beside her as Floyd begged for his life with Chauvin kneeling on his neck for 9½ minutes.

In requesting a longer sentence for Chauvin, Ellison cited the presence of children at the scene as one of four factors that merited a prison term beyond the 10½-15 years recommended by state guidelines.

Cahill agreed on three other factors, but not the presence of children.

In his June sentencing memo, Cahill wrote that Frazier and another 17-year-old girl who also recorded the events, Alyssa Funari, "are observed smiling and occasionally even laughing over the course of several minutes."

He noted that Frazier and her cousin were "observed smiling for several seconds" and later were "laughing" as a male witness verbally confronted the officers. Cahill wrote that the two were "observed laughing out loud" after Floyd was lifted into an ambulance.

Frazier, Reynolds, Funari, and Kaylynn Gilbert, the third 17-year-old, testified at Chauvin's trial. Several broke into tears on the witness stand; at least one said she feared for her safety when Chauvin reached for his chemical irritant spray.

In his request to Cahill last week, Ellison wrote that deleting the portion of the sentencing memo would "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 the defendant's."

In his response Tuesday, the judge pointed out that at the June sentencing hearing, he explicitly stated that Chauvin's sentence "was not intended to 'send a message' of any kind."

Instead, Ellison's office ignored his statement and complained that Cahill's decision was sending a message, the judge wrote.

Cahill even took issue with the state's description of the four witnesses as young girls. He said the older three would more accurately be described as "young women."

The judge also rejected the state's claim that his sentencing memorandum contributed to the diminution of the trauma of "young Black girls." Cahill said the state was injecting "supposed racial presumptions" into the case. He noted that the state had previously not mentioned the race of the eyewitnesses and noted that anyone who observed video at the trial would have seen the women appeared to be Black, white and Hispanic.

"Whether the 'adultification' of 'Black girls' is, as the state insists, 'common in American society, including in the criminal justice system,' this court emphatically rejects the implication that it played any part in the court's sentencing decision," Cahill wrote.

The judge said he was well aware of the attention on the case in the media and among the pundit class, but noted that unlike them, he was constrained to applying the law, not acting on assumptions or presumptions.

"This court did not find that the presence of three young women and one young girl who observed the officers' restraint of George Floyd for several minutes before he was loaded onto a stretcher and placed into an ambulance by itself presented substantial and compelling reasons" for a longer sentence, he wrote. "For all these reasons, the court declines the state's invitation" to reconsider the sentencing memo.

Ellison's spokesman John Stiles said the attorney general's office was reviewing Cahill's response.

Staff Writer Chao Xiong contributed to this report.

Rochelle Olson • 612-673-1747