A second defense attorney at the federal trial of three Minneapolis police officers charged with violating George Floyd's civil rights says his client's training was inadequate.
Tom Plunkett, the attorney for J. Alexander Kueng, hammered away at a major part of the defense's contention that the officers were inadequately trained in intervention and that they deferred to Chauvin, who was the senior officer on the scene.
Kueng, Tou Thao, and Thomas Lane are charged with depriving Floyd of his right to medical care as Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd's neck over nine minutes in May of 2020.
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Twin Cities’ defense attorney Joe Tamburino, who is not associated with the case says each of the three have different reasons they say they are not guilty.
“Thao is basically saying ‘I was a traffic cop’. My job was to keep everybody at bay rather than have civilians get mixed up or interfere with what was happening in the arrest,” Tamburino told WCCO’s Susie Jones.
Tamburino says he believe the judge will allow all four closing arguments to take place today.
“Very rarely do we see four closing arguments happening on any case in one day,” Tamburino says. “In Federal Court it is common to have what’s called multiple defendant cases. You see that in a lot of drug crimes, conspiracy and so-forth. So that’s quite common. But packing them all in for a closing argument in one day, yes that’s pretty unusual.”