| See also here. Yesterday’s reports can be seen here and here. |
Throughout the day the defense moved speedily through six witnesses, including retired MPD Officer Scott Creighton, involved in Floyd’s year-earlier arrest-related drug ingestion event, and whose testimony included body camera footage of that event; retired paramedic and nurse Michelle Moseng, involved at the same event and the person who had observed Floyd’s sky-high blood pressure of 200/160 [!]; Shawanda Hill, the woman in Floyd’s SUV on May 25, 2020, the date of Floyd’s death; Minneapolis Parks Police Officer Peter Chang, who was present on duty at Floyd’s May 25,2020 arrest, and whose testimony included his body camera footage of that event; Minneapolis Police Department medical training coordinator Nicole MacKenzie, recalled as a defense witness after testifying for the state earlier in the trial; and finally Barry Brodd, the use-of-force expert witness retained by the defense for this trial.
I’ll state up front that all of those witnesses were helpful to the defense narrative of innocence in this case to at least some degree, really without exception. In my view, however, the three most important, at least in the context of the defense case in chief we’ve seen so far, were use-of-force expert Brodd, Parks Officer Chang, and Floyd ex-girlfriend Shawanda Hill, as well as the body camera footage of Officer Creighton.
The witness I’ll focus on the most here, however, is use-of-force expert witness Barry Brodd, and that’s not because he did a great job on the witness stand for the defense. Indeed, I found Brodd’s performance to fall astonishingly short of what the defense needed in this case, particularly in the specific context of use-of-force expertise.
