By an amazing coincidence, George Floyd had a fatal heart attack while Derek Chauvin was “kneeling” on (or very near!) his neck

Minnesota coroner doing his level best to bail out his murderous cop buddies:

Couple of points:

(1) Death by asphyxiation can never be ruled out by the (purported) absence of physical trauma. Plenty of murder convictions in which the victim was strangled or smothered or choked to death are obtained — especially in DV contexts — without such evidence. In other words you can choke someone to death without leaving frank physical evidence of your crime on the victim’s body.

(2) George Floyd was very much alive when Derek Chauvin got his hands on him, and dead by the time Chauvin stopped “arresting” him (he had no pulse when the ambulance arrived). The notion that a 46-year-old man who worked security at a bar had a fatal heart attack unrelated to asphyxiation at the same exact moment that Chauvin “appeared” to be asphyxiating him with his knee speaks for itself.

(3) If we’re really going to play this game, Minnesota, like almost all states, uses a but-for standard of causation in criminal cases. This means that if Chauvin’s actions caused Floyd to have a fatal heart attack, then Chauvin would be guilty of homicide, if those actions weren’t otherwise a justifiable use of force. Given that Floyd was lying on the ground handcuffed with Chauvin on top of him for several minutes when he had his incredibly coincidental “heart attack,” it’s clear that Chauvin should be guilty of murder anyway.