In a new book "Break the Wheel," released Tuesday, Attorney General Keith Ellison pulls back the curtain on the massive effort behind the pandemic-era prosecution of ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.
From the morning on the edge of his bed when he first saw the bystander video of Floyd's in-custody murder on Memorial Day 2020, Ellison takes the reader through the work of assembling the trial team, bringing in consultants to help with jury selection and finding witnesses — through to the verdict and aftermath.
As horrific as the video was for most, Ellison explains how the guilty verdict was far from certainty. He wrote the book, he said, as a guide for the next police brutality case.
"Tragically, this is probably going to happen again," he said in an interview. "These cases are not like your average criminal case. They're just not. They're very different so you need some resources to get a grip on that."
The trial in March and April 2021 was livestreamed to the world, so the characters in the book will be familiar to those who tracked it. Ellison's recounting is even-handed and informative. He didn't use the book to settle scores and had mostly generous observations about others, including the defense attorneys for Chauvin and the other three officers.
A criminal defense lawyer before he became the first Muslim elected to Congress in 2006, Ellison said he's a note-taker, a habit he continued through the trial. In June, he reviewed his notes, created an outline, then got up every morning at 5 a.m. to write for three hours. It took nine months.
He aimed to write five pages a day but the book was still overdue and bloated at 120,000 words when he turned it in. Editors whittled it to 70,000. While he was writing, Ellison also was seeking re-election. GOP nominee Jim Schultz portrayed Ellison as anti-cop and almost ousted him, losing by just 20,800 votes.
Ellison felt the pressure. "I knew that if equal justice was to prevail, I had to find a way to win," he wrote. "I simply could not allow the lesson to be that prosecuting a cop is political suicide."