The country is watching the ongoing trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin responsible for the death of George Floyd. Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. A pulmonologist revealed that Floyd’s death was caused by a “low level of oxygen,” not fentanyl as Chauvin’s lawyers have tried to claim, making the case as hotly contested as ever. Floyd’s death has been at the center of the Black Lives Matter movement and has drawn a lot of attention to the cause.
Floyd’s family’s attorney, Benjamin Crump, made a virtual appearance on The View to discuss the national interest in the case, and he revealed to host Joy Behar that actor George Clooney occasionally emails him to talk through social justice issues. Crump explained that Clooney wants his 3-year-old twins Alexander and Ella “to live in a better world” and that the Ocean’s Eleven star offered some stark advice on how to respond to Chauvin’s lawyers claiming that it was the drugs in Floyd’s system and not Chauvin’s knee on his neck for over 9 minutes that killed him.
Videos by PopCulture.com
“‘Attorney Crump, you should tell them if Derek Chauvin feels so confident in that, he should volunteer during his case, to get down on the floor in that courtroom, and let somebody come and put their knee on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds and be able to see if he can survive,’” Crump said that Clooney wrote in the email, which was confirmed by Entertainment Tonight.
“The experts will opine during this case that the average human being can go without oxygen from 30 seconds to 90 seconds — where George Floyd went without oxygen for over 429 seconds, and that’s why it was intentional what this officer did,” Crump continued. “And I believe in my heart, Joy Behar, that he will be held criminally liable and it will hopefully set a new precedent in America.”
It should be no surprise that Clooney, who is married to prominent human rights barrister Amal Clooney, takes a major interest in social justice issues. Last June, Clooney published an op-ed in The Daily Beast entitled “America’s Greatest Pandemic is Anti-Black Racism,” capturing the spirit of the anti-racist protests that were taking place worldwide.
“How many times have we seen people of color killed by police?” Clooney wrote. “Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Laquan McDonald. There is little doubt that George Floyd was murdered. We watched as he took his last breath at the hands of four police officers. Now we see another defiant reaction to the systemic cruel treatment of a portion of our citizens like we saw in 1968, 1992, and 2014.”
“The anger and the frustration we see playing out once again in our streets is just a reminder of how little we’ve grown as a country from our original sin of slavery,” he continued. “The fact that we aren’t actually buying and selling other human beings anymore is not a badge of honor. We need systemic change in our law enforcement and in our criminal justice system… This is our pandemic. It infects all of us, and in 400 years we’ve yet to find a vaccine.”
