Cause of death

The Chauvin trial is at last underway, with excellent daily reporting from PowerLine. The defendant is fortunate enough to have drawn a judge who takes his job seriously, almost alone in a city that appears unified in its desire to make this a show trial against an unjust society. As a result, to my amazement, the opening arguments largely stuck to the issue of what exactly it was that killed Mr. Floyd. After a disgraceful piece in the local rag arguing that the trial was a "vessel into which a splintered society places its rage, anxieties and hopes"--pretty much a recipe for lynch law--the same paper actually ran a fairly reasonable piece this week trying to sort through the conflicting evidence on the cause of death. It's hard to imagine how he got it past his editors.

If this were a civil case, it would be difficult to sort through the relative weight of the various contributing factors to Mr. Floyd's death. The picture is intolerably complicated by a fatal dose of fentanyl. I try to imagine how I'd view the evidence if it were myself being arrested, or someone from my own social circle that I knew and loved. Would I be thinking, "The person you're arresting is in clear medical distress; why are you so cavalier about the risks?" Or would I conclude that, if you resist arrest and act crazy and have to be restrained, then it turns out that you're dying of an OD, then it's just a slow-motion suicide by cop? Looking at it from the opposite perspective, if the defendant in this trial had for some reason forcibly administered the fatal dose of fentanyl to Mr. Floyd, then tried to argue that what really killed him was a knee on the neck, wouldn't I scoff? Wouldn't I reject the argument that the fentanyl wasn't all that dangerous, because Mr. Floyd, an addict, had such a high tolerance?

In a civil trial, the jury might be allowed to allocate percentages to the liability of the various people who created dangerous conditions, which in this fact pattern might well result in a very high percentage being allocated to the decision to swallow the fatal evidence of fentanyl. In a criminal trial, however, the jury has to resolve any reasonable doubt over whether Mr. Chauvin's actions were the effective cause of death. It can't help much that the jury will be allowed and/or instructed to take into account that there can be multiple causes of death, or that a potential fatal treatment can be considered the cause of death even if someone else (including the decedent) had contributed a cause of death that either took effect seconds before the action of the criminal defendant, or would have caused death within seconds in any case.

The only certain conclusion I can draw is that I wouldn't want to live there, and I certainly wouldn't want to serve on a police force in that city. It's a mystery how they keep a police force together at all. Frankly it's hard to see how such a broken city survives.