Derek Chauvin Trial Live Updates: Medical Examiner Called by Defense Blames Floyd’s Heart for His Death

Judge Peter A. Cahill said this week that if the defense’s case continues ahead of schedule, the court would not convene on Friday so that closing arguments would not happen until Monday. As soon as closing arguments are finished, the jury will be sequestered and can take as long as it needs to deliver a verdict.

Jury selection — eight days of intense questioning to potential jurors about their political biases and views on racism and policing — began on March 9. Ultimately, 12 jury members and two alternates were chosen.

Both sides delivered opening statements on March 29, which were followed by the prosecution calling their witnesses to the stand. Each witness is questioned by the state, then cross-examined by the defense. Questioning goes back and forth between the state and the defense.

Each side submitted a list of potential witnesses to the judge ahead of the trial: The state submitted the names of 363 potential witnesses, and the defense listed 212, but it was unclear how many would actually appear.

Pete Orput, the top prosecutor in Washington County, said in an email to The New York Times on Wednesday that the complaint would be filed later on Wednesday.

Ms. Potter, 48, had served on the force for 26 years and was training other officers when they pulled Mr. Wright’s car over on Sunday afternoon, saying he had an expired registration on his car and something hanging from his rearview mirror. When officers discovered that Mr. Wright had a warrant out for his arrest and tried to arrest him, he twisted away and got back into his car.

Ms. Potter warned him that she would Tase him and then shouted “Taser” three times before firing a bullet into his chest, killing him. “I just shot him,” Ms. Potter says in body-camera footage that was released this week.

The killing has brought hundreds of people to the Brooklyn Center Police Department each night, where they have been met by Minnesota National Guard members and State Patrol troopers who have fired tear gas, rubber bullets and other projectiles at the crowd. Some of the demonstrators have launched fireworks and thrown rocks and bottles of water at the police. Officers arrested 79 people on Tuesday night. Dozens of businesses in the region were broken into earlier in the week, but there were few reports of looting on Tuesday.

The local government in Brooklyn Center, a city of about 30,000 people, has also been in crisis. The City Council gave the mayor more authority in the wake of Mr. Wright’s death and the city manager, who had previously overseen the Police Department, was fired.

The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that investigated Mr. Floyd’s death in May, has led the inquiry into the killing.

Dr. Fowler and others have vigorously attacked a study that said medically irrelevant information, like the race of the victim, could sway medical examiner determinations.

Dr. Fowler explained that a death certificate includes a primary cause of death as well as other significant conditions contributing to a person’s death, per guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

He said it was his medical opinion that Mr. Floyd suffered cardiac arrhythmia, which was contributed to by his underlying health conditions, including heart disease, drug use and exposure to carbon monoxide from the exhaust pipe during his restraint by the police.

“All of those combined to cause Mr. Floyd’s death,” he said.

While he was chief medical examiner of Maryland, Dr. Fowler ruled that the death of Anton Black, a Black teenager who was killed during an interaction with the police in 2018, was an accident, The Baltimore Sun reported. No one was charged.

In December, Mr. Black’s family filed a federal lawsuit against Dr. Fowler, the officers involved in the incident and others.

“Two years before George Floyd died after being restrained and pinned down by police, 19- year-old Anton Black (‘Anton’ or ‘Decedent’) was killed by three white law enforcement officials and a white civilian in a chillingly similar manner on Maryland’s Eastern Shore,” the lawsuit reads.

According to the lawsuit, officers restrained Mr. Black in a prone position for around six minutes after he had been Tasered and handcuffed as he “struggled to breathe, lost consciousness and suffered cardiac arrest.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, which is part of the plaintiffs’ legal team, released a statement Wednesday. “Under Dr. Fowler’s leadership, the Maryland Office of the Medical Examiner has been complicit in creating false narratives about what kills Black people in police encounters,” it said. “The medical examiner blamed Anton for his own death — peppering its report with false claims about laced drugs, a heart condition, and even Anton’s bipolar disorder — instead of the police who killed him. The family was forced to pay for outside experts’ help to understand what really killed Anton.”

In 2015, Dr. Fowler’s office issued a homicide ruling in the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man from Baltimore who died of a spinal cord injury after a widely circulated cellphone video showed him being dragged screaming into a police transport van.

In that case, six officers were initially charged with crimes including manslaughter and murder; the first trial ended in a hung jury, and three more officers were acquitted after trials before a judge.

Dr. Fowler was also an adjunct associate professor of pathology and pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and has taught at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and other universities around Maryland. He serves as the National Association of Medical Examiners representative for the Forensic Science Standards Board. He also serves as a forensic pathology consultant for the Forensics Panel, a national organization that performs peer review for cases.

“If he puts himself in that car, he exposes himself to possession charges,” Ms. Cousins said Wednesday, noting that drugs were found in the car in two searches.

Judge Peter A. Cahill granted Mr. Hall’s invocation of the Fifth Amendment right, calling his reasoning valid.

Judge Cahill had ordered Derek Chauvin’s lawyer to draft a narrow list of questions that Mr. Hall might be able to answer without incriminating himself. Like Tuesday’s questioning of Shawanda Hill, who was also in the car with Mr. Floyd when he was arrested, the defense had hoped to ask about Mr. Floyd’s demeanor and behavior right before the arrest to bolster its argument that a drug overdose caused his death.

But Ms. Cousins said even answering those questions had the potential to incriminate him, and Judge Cahill agreed.

In her testimony, Mr. Floyd’s former girlfriend, Courteney Ross, said she and Mr. Floyd had purchased drugs from Mr. Hall in the past.

Mr. Hall has appeared in body camera footage throughout the trial, and on Tuesday, newly released footage showed him standing alongside Ms. Hill after Mr. Floyd had been taken away by officers.

According to a Minnesota official, Mr. Hall provided a false name to officers at the scene of Mr. Floyd’s arrest. At the time, he had outstanding warrants for his arrest on felony possession of a firearm, felony domestic assault and felony drug possession.

Mr. Hall was a longtime friend of Mr. Floyd’s. Both Houston natives, they had connected in Minneapolis through a pastor and had been in touch every day since 2016, Mr. Hall said in an interview with The Times last year. Mr. Hall said that he considered Mr. Floyd a confidant and a mentor, like many in the community.

Several witnesses called by the prosecution have testified that Mr. Floyd died from a lack of oxygen, and that they saw no evidence of a drug overdose or a heart attack. Those other potential causes of death have been the primary focus of the defense from the outset of the trial.

The trial moves forward amid continued fallout from the recent shooting of a Black man by a police officer in Brooklyn Center, a Minneapolis suburb. On Tuesday, the police officer who shot and killed Daunte Wright, 20, resigned, along with the department’s police chief.

The fate of Mr. Chauvin, who is charged with murdering Mr. Floyd, rests largely on how jurors answer two questions: whether his actions caused Mr. Floyd to die, and whether he violated use-of-force policies when he kept his knee on Mr. Floyd for nine and a half minutes.

The defense’s key witness on Tuesday, Barry Brodd, a use-of-force expert, began his testimony with unequivocal support of Mr. Chauvin, cross-examination by a prosecutor exposed some inconsistencies with his position.

Mr. Brodd initially testified that Mr. Chauvin’s restraint was not a “use of force” at all, but rather a restraint that was considered safe and generally painless. When a prosecutor pushed him on the issue, though, Mr. Brodd conceded that the restraint was a use of force according to the policies of the Minneapolis Police Department.

He also later admitted that the restraint could cause pain and went back and forth with a prosecutor who played a video of the arrest that captured Mr. Floyd saying, “Everything hurts,” along with other exclamations of pain.

Mr. Brodd said he had heard those comments during his review of the arrest but had not “noted it.” He also said that, in his opinion, Mr. Floyd continued to resist the officers even when he was handcuffed and facedown on the street, pinned under the knee of Mr. Chauvin. The prosecutor, Steve Schleicher, asked whether Mr. Floyd was actually “writhing on the ground because he can’t breathe.”

The cross-examination of Mr. Brodd could be costly for the defense if jurors decide that he lost some credibility by backtracking on the use-of-force issue.

Jurors also heard on Tuesday from Shawanda Hill, who was in the car with Mr. Floyd when he was first approached by officers. Ms. Hill said he was “happy, normal, talking, alert” in the Cup Foods convenience store in the minutes before he was arrested. Once Mr. Floyd was in the vehicle, Ms. Hill said he fell asleep. Other than being tired, though, she said Mr. Floyd seemed normal and in good health.

Then, just after 9:30 p.m., State Patrol officers fired several flash bangs into the air and rushed a group of people at the front of the crowd who had been shielding themselves from police projectiles with umbrellas. Law enforcement had fired chemical spray, flash bangs and paintballs to disperse the crowd.

The efforts pushed a significant number of people out of the area, and the police appeared to detain several people as a line of Patrol officers stood guard.

Alyah Jacobson, 21, and Dimitri Pickett, 22, were among the protesters who left the area surrounding the police station before debating whether to regroup elsewhere.

The couple had driven in from the St. Paul suburb of Mahtomedi and said they were not deterred by the police response. “I didn’t feel threatened, and I’m not scared. I’ll come back,” Ms. Jacobson said. She added, of their 2-year-old daughter, “I’m not going to let her grow up in this kind of world.”

Humvees and National Guard vehicles circled neighborhood streets before the start of a 10 p.m. curfew in Brooklyn Center that also applied in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Dozens of people were arrested on Monday for violating an earlier curfew.

Mr. Brodd’s testimony contradicted that of numerous witnesses who were called by the prosecution, including other use-of-force experts and the chief of the Minneapolis Police Department.

The defense also called several other witnesses, including a woman who was in the car with Mr. Floyd just before police officers arrived.

As the defense called its witnesses to the stand, officials in Minnesota scrambled to deal with the fallout from the fatal shooting of a Black man by a police officer in suburban Minneapolis over the weekend. The officer who fired the fatal shot, as well as the police chief for Brooklyn Center, the suburb where the shooting happened, both resigned on Tuesday.

Here are key takeaways from Day 12 of the trial.

• Mr. Brodd said that the officers who arrested Mr. Floyd had acted appropriately every step of the way. “I felt that Derek Chauvin was justified, and was acting with objective reasonableness, following Minneapolis Police Department policy and current standards of law enforcement, in his interactions with Mr. Floyd,” he said. Mr. Brodd also said that Mr. Chauvin’s actions did not qualify as a use of force at all, and that the fact that Mr. Floyd died did not mean Mr. Chauvin had used “deadly force.” He compared the situation to that of a police officer who uses a Taser, only to have the suspect fall back, hit their head and die. Though the suspect died, the initial use of force could still be reasonable, he said. Mr. Brodd also said the prone position in which Mr. Floyd was kept for nine and a half minutes was safe, did not typically hurt suspects and was an accepted way to control someone during an arrest.

• During cross-examination, Mr. Brodd acknowledged that Mr. Chauvin’s restraint qualified as a use of force under the policies of the Minneapolis Police Department, though he had previously said it was not a use of force. In addition, he had initially said that the prone position in which Mr. Floyd was placed was unlikely to hurt suspects. During cross-examination, though, a prosecutor played body camera footage from the arrest which captured Mr. Floyd explicitly saying, “Everything hurts,” along with other exclamations of pain. Mr. Brodd said that he had heard these exclamations during his review of the tapes, but that he didn’t “note it.”

• The prosecution and Mr. Brodd appeared to view the videos of the arrest from completely different perspectives. On several points, common ground was hard to find. For example, when watching video of Mr. Floyd pinned to the ground, Mr. Brodd said he thought that Mr. Floyd was resisting. The prosecutor, though, said Mr. Floyd was “writhing on the ground because he can’t breathe.”

• Jurors also heard from a woman who was with Mr. Floyd just before police officers approached his vehicle, and they saw new body camera footage from Peter Chang, an employee of the Minneapolis Park Police and a licensed peace officer who responded to the scene of the arrest. Both witnesses provided new insight on Mr. Floyd’s condition before he was taken to a police cruiser and eventually pinned to the ground.

• The woman, Shawanda Hill, said Mr. Floyd was “happy, normal, talking, alert” while in the Cup Foods convenience store before he was arrested. Ms. Hill said that Mr. Floyd had offered to give her a ride home, and they went to a vehicle together. Mr. Floyd then fell asleep while she took a phone call in the vehicle, she said. Other than being tired, Ms. Hill said, Mr. Floyd seemed normal, never complaining of shortness of breath or chest pains; the defense has suggested that Mr. Floyd died of complications from drug use and a heart condition.

• In Mr. Chang’s body camera footage, Mr. Floyd can be seen handcuffed and sitting on the street as a police officer asked him for his name and birthday. Mr. Floyd answered the officer coherently and did not try to flee. The footage could benefit the prosecution, which has argued that the officers, particularly Mr. Chauvin, acted unreasonably during what should have been a routine interaction.

Traditionally, such discussions happen with the lawyers and the judge huddled together and speaking in hushed tones. But because of coronavirus protocols in this trial, the answer to the question, “May I approach the bench?” is a definite “No.” So by using microphones and headsets, and by playing white noise to the jurors, the sidebar can happen with the participants at a safe distance.

“Please understand we are not attempting to conceal anything from you which it is necessary for you to hear,” Judge Peter A. Cahill told the jury at the beginning of the trial.

And, he added, “Please do not attempt to listen in.”

By combining videos from bystanders and security cameras, reviewing official documents and consulting experts, The New York Times reconstructed in detail the minutes leading to Mr. Floyd’s death. Our video shows officers taking a series of actions that violated the policies of the Minneapolis Police Department and turned fatal, leaving Mr. Floyd unable to breathe, even as he and onlookers called out for help.

Among the people allowed in the courtroom, on the 18th floor of the Hennepin County Government Center, are: the judge, jurors, witnesses, court staff, lawyers, Mr. Chauvin and only a handful of spectators.

The judge, Peter A. Cahill, wrote in an order on March 1 that only one member of Mr. Floyd’s family and one member of Mr. Chauvin’s family would be allowed in the room at any time. Two seats that are reserved for reporters and various journalists, including from The New York Times, will be rotating throughout the trial.

The lawyers, spectators, jurors and witnesses are required to wear masks when they are not speaking. Spectators are prohibited from having any visible images, logos, letters or numbers on their masks or clothing, according to Judge Cahill’s order.