Thread by @jbarro

This is just such horseshit. Conservatives who are vaguely mad about black activism but can't actually argue for Derek Chauvin's innocence have fallen back to this theoretical argument that the jury was under undue pressure. mediaite.com/tv/tucker-carl…

It's likely that people were worried about unrest if there was an acquittal. (We can see this in practice, like with LA closing vaccines sites for the day, which it should not have done.) But where is any evidence that this mattered at the margin, for the verdict?

You could theoretically have a condition where cops were unjustly convicted because people feared riots. But can people point to specific cases where that has happened? Whereas we can point to many cases where police and governments have been unaccountable.

As always, policy should attend to actually existing problems before theoretically possible problems.

The jury came back very quickly. This isn't the action of a jury that was reluctant to convict but feared what would happen if they didn't. The case against Chauvin was strong, that's why he was convicted.

Partly what's happened is this case has become an abstraction for some national commentators. Just another aspect of a broader political and ideological fight. But a jury, immersed for weeks in the evidence, will be horrified for all the obvious reasons and not mired in politics.

This isn't some college administrator firing an adjunct professor because he doesn't want to deal with student complaints about some shit that was said in class.

If this case were a closer call, maybe the political environment would have weighed on the jury. But if the case were a closer call, the political environment also would have been different. This case generated such outrage *because* the fact pattern was so indefensible.