The Coming Chauvin Sentencing Riots

With Chauvin having been found guilty on all three counts, it is now time to predict what is going to happen at sentencing. 

To review, Chauvin has been convicted of three crimes: second degree unintentional felony murder (with a maximum jail term of 40 years), third degree “depraved mind” murder (with a maximum jail term of 25 years), and second degree manslaughter (with a maximum jail term of 10 years). In Minnesota law, they are all very similar as they do not require that the perpetrator specifically intended to kill the victim, but rather took very risky unsafe action with regard to the victim. With the more severe violations representing not so much a greater degree of probability of death from the action so much as a greater degree of lack of regard for the life of the victim by the perpetrator. That is the distinction is mostly in the perpetrator's mind-set.

The way Minnesota law works is that he CAN be found guilty of all of the charges even though they are all referring to the same homicide. The purpose of this is to give the Jury the discretion to decide what level of intent was present rather than force the prosecution to make a specific case for a specific level of intent. However, the SENTENCING can only be for the most severe of the charges. Even found guilty of all three charges, Chauvin can not be sentenced for all three. (That would be double jeopardy which prohibits being punished twice for the same crime. If the legal system didn't prohibit double jeopardy, then sentencing limits would have no meaning as there would be nothing preventing a judge from sentencing a convict of any crime as many times as necessary to reach an effective life-sentence). 

So the idea that Chauvin having been convicted of all three might be sentenced to 75 years (the sum of the maximum sentences of all three) is completely wrong, yet it occasionally gets trotted out by the legally ignorant. This is unfortunate because it creates a false expectation.  If that were all there were to false expectations, it would likely not cause riots. Unfortunately, the problem of false expectations becomes even more severe when one considers that Chauvin has no prior convictions and by Minnesota's recommended sentencing guidelines he would likely only serve 12.5 years for the most severe second degree charge that he has been found guilty of. 

Now think about that. There are activists out there expecting a 75-40 year sentence, and yet he will only likely be sentenced to a fraction of that. 

Do you really think that those activists will register their displeasure by peacefully signing a petition, perhaps standing in silence and having rational earnest debates? No. We're going to see rioting and looting and calls for reparations and all the usual bad behavior that comes from mobs being promised blood and then not getting it. Minnesota has mobilized the national guard in anticipation, but the George Floyd riots were a national, even global, phenomenon last time and we need to be prepared for that all over again. 

Of course, for some, there is no sentence severe enough to not justify rioting. Chauvin could be executed and his body dismembered and displayed publicly in pieces across the country as the UK used to do with traitors and they would still consider it to light a sentence. We are not talking about them... we are talking about the less radical individuals who would not riot if only they were given a reasonable expectation of the likely sentence before it was announced, and further were schooled in why there are a wide variety of sentences for a given crime. (You know, what used to be covered in civics classes back when we had a functioning education system). Because such an expectation is not being built up in the media and from our leaders, ANY likely sentence will be considered an injustice by the mob. And cities will burn as a result. The lives and property destroyed by those riots will be absolutely at the feet of the media and politicians who stoked the flames and promoted the ignorance that caused them. 

Unfortunately, it gets worse than that. Because of Maxine Waters and other politicians public comments, combined with the Judge's decision not to sequester the jury, there is a high probability that there will be a mistrial declared and that the country will have to go through the whole trial and sentencing with associated false expectations and subsequent riots all over again, perhaps several times with various appeals, in coming years. 

The severity of the coming Chauvin riots will be interesting in a grim sort of way to watch. This is not an election year, and the Democrats are in control of the federal government, so they derive less political value from stoking race tensions right now in mid 2021. However, a year and a half from now will be the midterm elections of 2022, and that changes things. America has a tendency to swing congressional elections against the party currently holding the White House; which is an eventuality that the left will want to avoid considering how narrow their control of either house of congress is.  So expect much more severe riots surrounding mistrial decisions and appeals in 2022 than in this year.  

My friend Gideon Fell, has written an article series detailing how the organization Black Lives Matter, consistently and routinely sells out the interests and very lives of the people it supposedly represents to enrich itself and its leaders at their expense, and the Democrat party is no different. To them, race is just a tool for winning elections. They don't want to actually solve racial issues, that would weaken the tool that they want to use. They see the deaths of black men as useful sacrifices on the altar of their own political ambitions. Suddenly Maxine Water's comments, and their timing, start to make a lot of sense don't they? It's almost as if she were thinking: "How can I ensure a mistrial so that we can harvest racial hatred for 2022 and avoid a Red Wave in the midterms?"