The challenge of a fair trial for Derek Chauvin

In December the Hennepin County District Court made public a questionnaire it was sending to prospective jurors in the upcoming murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

To imagine giving honest answers to the court’s lengthy list of queries — posed, the court explains, in hopes the written exam will “help to shorten the jury selection process” — is to understand why it might just take a little time to find impartial and unintimidated jurors for this case in this community.

It is to understand, in short, how staggering a challenge Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill faces in ensuring a proceeding that will actually deserve to be called a fair trial for Chauvin and eventually three other cops accused in the tragic and world famous death of George Floyd on a Minneapolis street last May.

The challenge is that many minds have long since been made up by the worldwide dissemination of the shocking initial video images of one part of Floyd’s fatal encounter with the police, and by the way his story quickly became an emblem, symbolizing centuries of racial injustice and the long history of police mistreatment of Black Americans.