Federal Grand Jury Indicts Four Former Police Officers Involved in George Floyd’s Death

The news is not getting better for the terminated police officers who took part in the death of an unarmed Black Minneapolis man last May.

Weeks after being found guilty for killing George Floyd on a Minneapolis street while kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for about 9 minutes, the former police officer, Derek Chauvin, has now been charged in a federal case. The pending charges accuse him and the other three police officers on the scene that fateful day of violating the civil rights of Floyd.

According to The Associated Press, a federal grand jury has indicted the four former Minneapolis police officers who were involved in Floyd’s arrest and death. The men have been accused of willfully violating the Black man’s constitutional rights as he was restrained face-down on the pavement and telling them that he couldn’t breathe.

The three-count indictment was unsealed and it names Chauvin, and fellow former police officers, Thomas Lane, J. Kueng, and Tou Thao.

Chauvin has also been charged with violating Floyd’s right to be free from unreasonable seizure and unreasonable force by a police officer. Two other former police officers, Thao and Kueng, have also been charged with violating Floyd’s right to be free from unreasonable seizure because they did not intervene or stop Chauvin as he kept his knee on Floyd’s neck. All four former officers have been charged for their failure to provide Floyd with medical care as well.

According to CBS News, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network provided the following in a written statement:

“For many years we have tried to get the federal government to make it clear that these crimes are not only state crimes but violate civil rights on a federal level when police engage in this kind of behavior. What we couldn’t get them to do in the case of Eric Garner, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and countless others, we are finally seeing them do today and this is a significant development for those of us who have been engaged in the struggle and police reform movement.”