Sunday, November 26, 2023

Derek Chauvin stabbed in prison

Headline:

Ex-officer Derek Chauvin, convicted in George Floyd’s killing, stabbed in prison, AP source says

Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, was stabbed by another inmate and seriously injured Friday at a federal prison in Arizona, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

The attack happened at the Federal Correctional Institution, Tucson, a medium-security prison that has been plagued by security lapses and staffing shortages. The person was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the attack and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity.

The Bureau of Prisons confirmed that an incarcerated person was assaulted at FCI Tucson at around 12:30 p.m. local time Friday. In a statement, the agency said responding employees contained the incident and performed “life-saving measures” before the inmate, who it did not name, was taken to a hospital for further treatment and evaluation.

No employees were injured and the FBI was notified, the Bureau of Prisons said. Visiting at the facility, which has about 380 inmates, has been suspended.

"The FBI was notified." What a joke. The FBI hates US citizens, or at least US citizens of a certain stripe. And why did the unnamed inmate have to be hospitalized?

I admit I was wrong about Derek Chauvin. When the news about George Floyd's death first came out, I was among the first to react in horror and decry police action. The video of Chauvin's knee on Floyd's neck made the situation seem cut and dried. But not long after the incident, all sorts of exculpatory information started to leak out; it was apparently all ignored by the court and/or the jury that tried Chauvin. Floyd's postmortem toxicology report was released, and a scan of it quickly became a meme: the dude was a walking pharmacy when he died. By rights, Chauvin should not have been found guilty. And if a man is shouting "I can't breathe," you have to wonder where he's getting the air to shout that.  Someone truly choking might manage to gasp "I can't breathe" in a weak voice, but shouting? (Also: Floyd was apparently complaining about being unable to breathe well before Chauvin held him down—a result of the chemicals in his bloodstream.)

For me, the moral of the story is that innocent until proven guilty is a legal principle for a reason. I now know better than ever to rush to judgment, especially when an incident is fresh. Give any incident at least a week for people to sort through the facts, and don't be quick to trust those fact-sorters, especially these days. Liars abound.



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