Since when does the First Amendment cover PERJURY? Not to mention that this trial wouldn't even be taking place if the police department hadn't been burned to the ground. Who remembers, prior to that, that a string of cops had been dispatched to Chauvin's house to protect him during the protests?

On Tuesday, Barry Brodd, a former Santa Rosa, California police officer, took the stand as a police “use of force expert.” Brodd claimed that Chauvin did not use “deadly force” when he knelt on Floyd’s neck until Floyd became unresponsive. And at one point, Brodd claimed that Floyd should have been “resting comfortably” on the pavement as Chauvin’s knee pressed down on his neck.

Brodd also testified that Chauvin was using a “prone control” technique when he was kneeling on Floyd’s neck. According to Brodd’s twisted sophistry, “the maintaining of the prone control is not a use of force” because it is a “control technique.” Brodd added: “It doesn’t hurt.”

Brodd’s testimony strung together one inflammatory argument after another: police officers wear uniforms and “criminals don’t wear uniforms”; drug users exhibit “superhuman strength” and “do not feel pain”; officers have to act preemptively and do not have to wait for threats to emerge; videos do not “show what the officer is actually feeling”; Chauvin was restraining Floyd for Floyd’s own safety; and when Floyd said “I can’t breathe,” this demonstrated that he was able to breathe.

Brodd went on to imply, in a manner calculated to be as provocative as possible, that the responsibility for Floyd’s death actually rested with those who filmed the murder, because they were distracting Chauvin and making him feel threatened. “Crowd issues took the attention of the officers,” Brodd claimed, classifying the “crowd” as a “threat.”

According to Chauvin’s experts, Floyd spontaneously died of natural and other causes that were unrelated to any of the conduct of the police. Fowler was permitted to testify in court, without any scientific basis, that Floyd died from carbon monoxide poisoning, allegedly from the tailpipe of a nearby police car, combined with a tumor, drugs, high blood pressure and underlying heart disease.

Fowler’s testimony reached the zenith of absurdity when he claimed to have ruled out asphyxia as a cause of death because such a diagnosis was “unsupported by any experimental data.”

Indeed, there have been no medical “experiments” attempting to replicate what Chauvin did to Floyd—because any such “experiments,” in which human subjects would be killed by asphyxiation, would be forbidden by the Nuremberg Code, which was adopted after the trials of Nazi doctors following the Second World War.

It is a scandal and an indictment of the American judicial system that these fascistic provocations were allowed to take place in the courtroom at all. Under the Minnesota rules of evidence, it is the judge who has the discretion to determine whether an expert witness is qualified and whether the expert’s opinions are scientific, helpful, and reliable.

Judge Peter Cahill would have been entirely within his powers to slam the courthouse door in the faces of Brodd and Fowler. Instead, the judge repeatedly overruled objections that were raised by the prosecutors.