Looks like one of the jurors in the Derek Chauvin trial in the case of the murder of George Floyd has handed Derek Chauvin’s attorney yet another reason for appeal on a silver platter.
Even though juror number #52, now identified as Brandon Mitchell, promised the judge he didn’t hear anything about the Floyd civil case and didn’t know if Chauvin did anything wrong or had an intention to harm anyone, the t-shirt that he wore in August of 2020 tells a different story.
In a now-deleted Facebook post, Mitchell is wearing a Black Lives Matter hat and a t-shirt that says “Get Your Knee off our Necks” which is a reference to Floyd dying from the police officer pressing his knee against Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes before he died. So OBVIOUSLY Mitchell had an opinion about what happened before the trial.
Being a Black Lives Matter supporter shows that Mitchell had a predisposition to be on the side of a certain ideology where people believe the black suspect or victim over the police officers when a reported racial incident is in the news.
It appears in hindsight that Mitchell went into the jury booth to be an advocate. He said as much in a recent interview.
Mitchell recently participated in a media interview with radio host and gospel artist Erica Campbell. She asked about why he decided to respond to the jury summons. He said, “If we wanna see change, we wanna see some things going different. We gotta get out there and get into these avenues, get into these rooms to try to spark some change. Jury duty is one of those things – jury duty, voting. All of those things we gotta do.”
He shouldn’t have been allowed to be on the jury to begin with because of his answer to the jury questionnaire about why he wanted to be on the jury. Once again, it sounded more like he wanted to be an advocate when he said, “because of all of the protests and everything that happened after the event. This is the most historic case of my lifetime, and I would love to be a part of it.”
Between the shirt and his responses to questions, it seems pretty obvious that Mitchell probably knew more about the case than he admitted to the attorneys and judge even though he told them differently.
Chauvin’s attorneys will most likely use this new information as one of many reasons for an appeal.
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