Derek Chauvin was moved from the Minnesota State Penitentiary, where he was often held in solitary confinement, to a medium-security federal prison in Arizona. There, a former police officer convicted of George Floyd’s murder could be held under less restrictive conditions.
Chauvin was taken Wednesday from a high-security prison outside Minneapolis. he often spent most of the day in a 10-by-10-foot cellto the Federal Correctional Facility in Tucson, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
The Tucson facility houses 266 inmates, both male and female, as part of a larger complex that includes high-security prisons and minimal-security satellite camps.
Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Randy Lee Jamsoe declined to provide details of Chauvin’s confinement status, citing privacy, safety and security concerns.
Experts have previously said Chauvin is likely to be safer in the federal system. There are usually less violent inmates there, making him less likely to mix with inmates he arrests or investigates as a Minneapolis police officer.
“It’s dangerous to be a cop in any prison,” former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger said after Chauvin was sentenced last month. There are gangsters, for example, and police officers don’t do well there.These risks are mitigated in federal prisons.”
Chauvin executed last month 21 years in federal civil rights lawsuit after pleading in U.S. District Court in St. Paul Guilty by agreement with the prosecutor. He had already served 22.5 years in prison after being convicted in a state court of murder and manslaughter. A condition of the agreement was that the sentences would be carried out in federal prisons at the same time.
Chauvin, who is white, pinned an unarmed black man on the pavement by his knee for nine and a half minutes after a bystander video caught Floyd gasping and screaming for help. I killed Floyd was accused of handing over counterfeit bills at a nearby grocery store.
Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020 Storm of protests around the world It refocused attention on police brutality and racism.
U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson, when sentencing Chauvin, suggested placing him near his family living between Iowa and Minnesota. However, federal officials are not bound by judicial demands.
According to the Tucson Prison Inmate Orientation Handbook, inmates are responsible for tasks such as cleaning and mopping cell floors and removing trash. The prison offers a leisure program that includes “organized and informal games, sports, physical fitness, table games, hobby crafts, musical programs, intramural activities, social and cultural organizations, and movies.”
Magnuson last month sentenced former Minneapolis police officer J. Alexander Kuen to three years in prison and sentenced former police officer Tung Tao to three and a half years in prison. They intend to appeal their judgment. In early July, former officer Thomas Lane was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.he has been ordered to appear in a low-security federal prison camp in Colorado later this month.
At the same time that three former police officers went on trial, three men appeared in court in Georgia and charged with a federal hate crime in the murder of a black man, Ahmad Arbery. They were eventually found guilty.
Two of the men agreed to plead guilty to the case in exchange for serving their sentences in federal prison. They feared for their safety in state prison. A judge rejected the deal, partly because Arbery’s family strongly opposed it.
——-
AP’s full coverage of George Floyd’s death can be found at: https://apnews.com/hub/death-of-george-floyd