Although Mr Hussein called Chauvin’s conviction a milestone, he was reluctant to give Mr Ellison too much credit for saying the evidence and public awareness of the case, particularly from the viewer’s harrowing video, was so overwhelming that anything but a conviction would have been a grave failure.
After the verdict in the Chauvin case was read Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Ellison, who will prosecute three other officials on trial in August of the death of Mr. Floyd and due to appear on trial in August, will be prosecuted in the coming months measured. He said the result was merely a starting point that he hoped would lead to a full accounting of police abuse against people of color.
“However, I wouldn’t call today’s verdict fair,” said Ellison. “Because justice implies there is restoration. But it is accountability that is the first step towards justice. “
During a Tuesday evening meeting with his team, Mr. Ellison discovered that he had spent part of the day with Rev. Jesse Jackson and that Mr. Jackson had been with Rev. Dr. Jackson that day. Martin Luther King Jr. died in Memphis in 1968. Mr Katyal said Mr Ellison spoke at the meeting between what prosecutors did last year to get justice for Mr Floyd and the work of Dr. King and civil rights “connected” activists of the 1960s.
In his public statements on Tuesday, Mr. Ellison invoked the Kerner Commission, a group appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 to investigate the causes of racial injustice rioting in American cities.
“We still have the same problem here in 2021,” he said before reciting the names of other blacks killed by police, including Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Philando Castile and Daunte Wright, who were killed by a police officer Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center during the chauvin process.
“This has to end,” continued Mr. Ellison. “We need true justice. It is not a case. This is a social transformation that says no one is under the law and no one is above it. “
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