Former Minneapolis police officers ignored training and basic “human decency” when they chose not to intervene during the killing of George Floyd, a federal prosecutor said Tuesday, according to Reuters.
The three officers, Tou Thao, 36; J. Alexander Kueng, 28; and Thomas Lane, 38, pleaded not guilty to charges that they willfully denied Floyd’s right of medical aid in police custody during the incident as well as willfully breaching his rights by choosing not to intervene while fellow former officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, suffocated Floyd, who was Black, under his knees for over nine minutes.
The prosecutor claimed in front of a jury that the three had “front-row seats” to the May 2020 arrest and murder as they stood beside a parked police car.
Thao, Kueng and Lane chose not to do what “human decency and common sense required them to do: to stop the slow-motion killing unfolding right in front of them,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Manda M. Sertich claimed, according to Reuters.
During Floyd’s murder, people repeatedly asked the three officers on the sidelines to check his pulse.
Sertich said that, according to a video of Floyd’s death, Thao instead began to “argue and mock” people begging him to release Floyd from Chauvin’s life-threatening grip.
Kueng was smiling at a joke shared with Chauvin in the video. Lane suggested that the officers turn Floyd onto his side but continued pinning down his legs as Chauvin kneeled on his neck.
The three men are appearing in the U.S. District Court in St. Paul in a trial where the verdict is dependent on when officers are obligated to intervene in misconduct on the part of their colleagues.
Chauvin, 45, was convicted of Floyd’s murder in 2021 and was sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison.