Originally published 2021-04-22.
When Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd on 20 April 2021, attention turned at once to the three other Minneapolis officers at the scene: Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao. Each was charged in Minnesota with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Headlines warned they could face up to 40 years in prison. In the end, all three were convicted, but their sentences were measured in years, not decades.
This article explains what each former officer did on 25 May 2020, what the charges meant, why “40 years” was never the likely outcome, and how the state and federal cases finally ended.
Who the three officers were and what they did
George Floyd was detained outside Cup Foods in south Minneapolis after a store employee believed he had paid with a counterfeit $20 bill. Bystander and body-camera video showed him handcuffed and face-down in the street while officers restrained him.
- J. Alexander Kueng had finished the police academy in 2019 and was in his first months as a full officer. He knelt on Floyd’s back and torso, and later checked his wrist and reported that he could not find a pulse.
- Thomas Lane was also a rookie, only days into working on his own. He had drawn his gun when first approaching Floyd’s car, handcuffed him, and then held his legs during the restraint.
- Tou Thao, the most experienced of the three, arrived after Floyd was handcuffed. He did not touch Floyd. He stood between the officers and a growing crowd of onlookers who were pleading for Floyd’s life, and pushed back at least one person who urged Chauvin to get off him.
Chauvin, the senior officer, kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, according to the evidence accepted at his trial. Early reports often gave a figure of almost nine minutes; the longer figure comes from the prosecution’s detailed analysis of the videos.
The questions Lane asked
Transcripts of body-camera footage, filed in court, showed that Lane twice raised the idea of changing Floyd’s position. He asked Chauvin: “Should we roll him on his side?” Chauvin replied: “No, staying put where we got him.”
Lane then said he was worried about “excited delirium or whatever”, and Chauvin answered that this was why they were keeping Floyd on his stomach. Floyd remained in that position until he became unresponsive.
Those exchanges cut both ways. Lane’s lawyers used them to argue that a junior officer had voiced concern to his superior. Prosecutors argued that recognising a risk and then continuing to hold a man down made the failure to act more serious, not less.
“Excited delirium” itself has since been largely discredited. It does not appear in standard diagnostic manuals, and in 2023 the American College of Emergency Physicians withdrew its earlier paper supporting the term and said it should not be used by police or expert witnesses. California banned its use as a cause of death on death certificates the same year.
What “aiding and abetting” means
Under Minnesota law, a person can be held criminally liable for a crime committed by someone else if they intentionally help, encourage or conspire with that person. For the three officers, this meant prosecutors did not have to prove they caused Floyd’s death themselves. They had to show the officers knew Chauvin was committing a crime and intended their own actions, or inaction where they had a duty to act, to further it.
That is why the charges against the three depended heavily on Chauvin’s conviction. Had Chauvin been acquitted, it would have been much harder to argue that the others had aided a crime at all.
Police officers also have a specific duty to intervene. Minneapolis policy required officers to stop or try to stop another officer using unreasonable force, and federal civil rights law allows officers to be prosecuted for failing to do so.
Why “40 years” was never the likely sentence
The most serious charge, unintentional second-degree murder, carries a maximum of 40 years in Minnesota. But the maximum is only the legal ceiling. Minnesota uses sentencing guidelines that set a “presumptive” sentence based on the offence and the person’s criminal history.
For someone with no prior record, as was the case for all four officers, the presumptive sentence for second-degree unintentional murder is about 12.5 years. Judges can go higher only if they find aggravating factors, and sentences for several charges arising from a single act are not simply added together.
Chauvin’s case shows how this works. Judge Peter Cahill found aggravating factors, including that Chauvin abused his position of authority and treated Floyd with particular cruelty, and on 25 June 2021 sentenced him to 22.5 years, well above the guideline figure but far below the maximum. He was not separately sentenced on the lesser counts. Some early coverage claimed he faced up to 75 years by adding up the maximum for every count; that was never how Minnesota sentencing works.
How the cases ended
The three former officers were first tried in federal court. On 24 February 2022, a jury convicted all three of violating Floyd’s civil rights by depriving him of medical care; Kueng and Thao were also convicted of failing to intervene to stop Chauvin. Chauvin had separately pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges and received 21 years, served alongside his state term.
The state cases followed:
- Thomas Lane pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to three years in state prison, served alongside a federal sentence of two and a half years.
- J. Alexander Kueng pleaded guilty in October 2022 to aiding and abetting manslaughter and received three and a half years, running together with a federal sentence of the same length. The murder charge was dropped.
- Tou Thao refused a plea deal. In a trial decided by a judge on the written record, he was found guilty on 1 May 2023 of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter and later sentenced to 57 months, alongside a federal term of three and a half years.
None of the three received anything close to 40 years. Their sentences reflected manslaughter rather than murder, their lack of prior records, and the difference between their roles and Chauvin’s.
Why the case still matters
Floyd’s death set off one of the largest protest movements in American history, with demonstrations in more than 2,000 US cities and over 60 countries, many organised under the Black Lives Matter banner. It also pushed police forces to rethink restraint techniques, especially holding people face-down, and the duty officers have to stop a colleague.
The three officers’ cases are often discussed in police training precisely because none of them was the one kneeling on Floyd’s neck. They show that standing by, holding a suspect’s legs or keeping witnesses back can carry criminal responsibility when another officer is using deadly force. For junior officers, the lesson is uncomfortable but clear: rank does not remove the obligation to intervene.
After a Justice Department investigation found patterns of excessive force and discrimination in the Minneapolis Police Department, the city agreed to negotiate a court-enforced consent decree to reform the force. In 2025 the federal government moved to drop that agreement, while Minneapolis remained bound by a separate settlement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.
Sources: Wikipedia: Trial of Derek Chauvin; Wikipedia: Murder of George Floyd; WGN/AP, April 2021; KARE 11: where the former officers are now; Wikipedia: Excited delirium; original h/t The Mind Unleashed.
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