White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday responded to public calls by conservative figures for President Donald Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted in 2020 for the murder of George Floyd.
Chauvin, who placed his knee on the neck of Floyd, an unarmed Black man, for more than nine minutes, was convicted on the state level of second-degree murder and sentenced to more than 22 years in 2021. Chauvin later pled guilty in a separate federal case for violating Floyd’s civil rights.
A now infamous video of the May 25, 2020 police encounter shows Floyd yelling repeatedly, “I can’t breathe” as Chauvin continued to hold his knee and body weight on Floyd as he became lifeless. Two autopsies ruled Floyd’s death a homicide. The murder, along with the fatal police shooting of Breonna Tayler, an unarmed Black woman sleeping in her home, in Louisville, Ky., became a lighting rod for the Black Lives Matter mass protests that advocated for racial justice amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
However, four years later, as many of the public sentiment on racial justice has regressed–particularly amid Trump’s return to the White House and his rolling back of diversity and racial equity policies across the federal government–conservative activists have been drumming up a public campaign for a presidential pardon for Chauvin.
Conservative podcaster and Trump supporter Ben Shapiro launched a petition for the Chauvin’s pardon, garnering more than 50,000 signatures, according to Axios. He and others argue that Chauvin, who was fired by the Minneapolis Police Department, was unjustly convicted and that Floyd’s death was caused by underlying health issues and drug use (Floyd’s autopsy determined he had heart disease and fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system). Those arguments were also made by Chauvin’s defense attorney.
A medical examiner who performed one of the autopsies testified Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck was “just more than Floyd could take” in terms of blocking oxygen to his heart.
When asked by a reporter in the Oval Office on March 7 if he would issue the pardon, Trump said, “No, I haven’t even heard about it.” However, that did not stop calls for the president to intervene. On Wednesday, during the White House press briefing, Press Secretary Leavitt essentially repeated Trump’s response but appeared to leave the door open.
“The president has been asked and answered this question. He said it’s not something he’s considering at this time,” she told reporters.
Trump issuing a pardon to Chauvin would only cover his federal conviction and not his state conviction, which carries his longest sentencing. The president taking such an action would be an about-face to the position he took in 2020 as president when Floyd was murdered.
“It’s a terrible thing,” Trump said at the White House in 2020. “We all saw what we saw. It’s hard to conceive anything other than what we did see. It should have never happened.”
