Originally published 2021-04-21.
On 20 April 2021 a Minneapolis jury found former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd. Hours later, standing with relatives and lawyers at a press conference, Floyd’s younger brother Philonise summed up what the family felt in one line: “Today, we are able to breathe again.”
The words were chosen with care. During his arrest eleven months earlier, George Floyd had told officers again and again that he could not breathe. His brother turned that plea around, using it to describe relief rather than suffocation. This page explains what the verdict covered, why that phrase struck such a chord, and how the legal story ended once the cameras left the courthouse.
What happened on 25 May 2020
George Floyd, a 46-year-old father who had moved to Minneapolis from Houston, bought cigarettes at Cup Foods on the corner of East 38th Street and Chicago Avenue. A shop employee believed he had paid with a counterfeit $20 bill and called the police.
Four officers ended up at the scene. Floyd was handcuffed and pressed face down on the road, and Chauvin knelt on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Floyd said he could not breathe at least 16 times, according to the record summarised by Wikipedia. Bystanders begged the officers to stop, and a teenager named Darnella Frazier filmed the encounter on her phone. Floyd lost consciousness and was later pronounced dead.
Earlier reports often said “almost nine minutes” or “8 minutes 46 seconds”. The figure established at trial, based on the video evidence, was 9:29.
The trial and the three charges
Chauvin faced three counts under Minnesota law: unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The third-degree murder charge had been dismissed in October 2020 and was reinstated in March 2021, shortly before jury selection finished.
Twelve anonymous jurors heard about three weeks of testimony from bystanders, paramedics, senior Minneapolis officers and medical experts. Several of Chauvin’s own former superiors testified that the restraint went far beyond department training. The defence argued that Floyd’s heart condition and drug use played a major part in his death.
Deliberations began on 19 April and lasted roughly ten hours. The jury returned guilty verdicts on all three counts.
Why the headlines said “12.5 to 75 years”
Immediately after the verdict, many outlets added up the maximum penalties for each count (40, 25 and 10 years) and reported that Chauvin faced as much as 75 years. In practice that was never realistic. Minnesota sentences only the most serious count when all the charges arise from a single act, and its guidelines set a presumptive term of 12.5 years for a first-time offender convicted of unintentional second-degree murder.
Why “breathe again” resonated so widely
“I can’t breathe” had already become a rallying cry years before Floyd’s death, after Eric Garner said the same words during a fatal chokehold in New York in 2014. When the Minneapolis video spread in late May 2020, the phrase returned to placards and murals around the world.
Protests followed in more than 2,000 American cities and in over 60 countries, many of them organised under the Black Lives Matter banner. Most were peaceful, though some nights saw arson, looting and clashes with police, including the burning of a Minneapolis police station. All of this unfolded in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.
That is the background to the reaction on verdict day. For many families who had watched earlier police cases end without convictions, a guilty finding against a white officer for killing a Black man was rare. Philonise Floyd described it as freedom extending beyond his own family, and crowds outside the Hennepin County courthouse cheered when the decision was read.
President Joe Biden spoke from the White House that evening. He called the killing “a murder in the full light of day” and said it had exposed systemic racism to the whole world. While the jury was still deliberating, he had told reporters he was praying for the right outcome, a remark some legal commentators thought unusual for a sitting president.
Sentencing: 22½ years
On 25 June 2021 Judge Peter Cahill sentenced Chauvin to 22½ years in prison, ten years above the guideline term. Prosecutors had asked for 30. Cahill told the court, “I’m not basing my sentence on public opinion,” and set out four aggravating factors in a written memorandum:
- Chauvin abused a position of trust and authority as a police officer.
- He treated Floyd with particular cruelty during the long restraint.
- He acted as part of a group of three or more people.
- The killing took place in front of children.
Floyd family lawyer Ben Crump said it was the longest sentence ever handed to a Minnesota police officer. Gianna Floyd, George’s young daughter, appeared in a recorded statement saying she missed her father. Chauvin offered brief condolences but said other legal matters prevented him from saying more.
The federal case and the other three officers
Chauvin’s “other legal matters” were federal civil rights charges. In December 2021 he pleaded guilty to violating Floyd’s constitutional rights, and in July 2022 he received a 21-year federal sentence, served at the same time as his state term.
The three officers who were with him, Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane, faced both federal and state prosecutions:
- Federal: in February 2022 a jury convicted all three of civil rights violations. In July 2022 Lane received 2½ years, Kueng 3 years and Thao 3½ years.
- State: Lane pleaded guilty in May 2022 to aiding and abetting manslaughter (3 years). Kueng pleaded guilty to the same charge in October 2022 (3½ years). Thao chose a judge-only trial and was found guilty in May 2023 (4¾ years). Each state sentence runs alongside the federal one.
What the case changed, and what it did not
A month before the trial began, the City of Minneapolis agreed to pay the Floyd family $27 million to settle their wrongful-death lawsuit, one of the largest such settlements in US history. The intersection where Floyd died became an informal memorial known as George Floyd Square.
Many supporters of the family were careful to say that a conviction is accountability, not justice in the full sense. A guilty verdict cannot return a father to his children, and campaigners argued that one high-profile case would not by itself change how police forces train or discipline officers. Others saw the verdict as proof that bystander video, testimony from fellow officers and an attentive jury can hold a police officer to account.
Both views sit inside Philonise Floyd’s sentence. The family could breathe again because the court had named what happened as murder. The wider argument about policing, which his brother’s death had pushed into the open, carried on long after that day in April.
Sources: Wikipedia: Trial of Derek Chauvin; Wikipedia: Murder of George Floyd; Al Jazeera, 25 June 2021: Chauvin sentenced to 22.5 years; Daily Mail: Floyd family press conference (original tip)
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