MISDIRECTION IN THE CHAUVIN TRIAL

Kwei--Wednesday

Shutterstock/Rena Schild

The Trial of Derek Chauvin

I have been closely following the trial of ex-police officer Derek Chauvin. I've missed very little of it. A couple of days ago I had one of those weird "parallel universe" experiences when the absurdity of what we are witnessing hit me in the face. The jury is being asked to accept that Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck with as much force as possible (calculated by pulmonary expert witness Martin Tobin to be some 90 pounds in total) did not cause Floyd's death. 

The case is historic in many ways, one of them being that it has an extraordinary amount of documentation from multiple types of cameras from different perspectives. So powerful are the videos that the only way Chauvin's lawyer, Eric Nelson, can defend his client is persuade the jury that something else was going on--the well-known "look-over-there" trick. 

Merriam Webster defines misdirection as

1. a wrong direction

2. a: the act or an instance of misdirecting or diverting

    b: the state of being misdirected

What Eric Nelson is engaging in is definition 2a in order to lure the jury into definition 2b. (Funnily  enough, that's what mystery writers do as well.)

Defense lawyer Eric Nelson (screenshot)

Planting seeds of doubt

If only one jury member dissents from the others, it will result in a mistrial, which in some ways is the worst possible outcome. At any rate, Nelson's task is arguably both difficult because of the video and easy because he only needs one jury member to "look over there." Much as we'd like to deny it, all jury members will bring along their belief systems and prejudices, and one of them may have just the right frame of mind for Nelson to wedge his way in and raise a doubt: Maybe, just maybe, if Mr. Floyd didn't have all those things "going on," he wouldn't have died:

1. Drug use: that Fentanyl stuff can be pretty lethal. Floyd might have had an overdose. Plus, the methamphetamine could have combined with the Fentanyl to produce a deadly combination.
2. Heart disease: Floyd had those bad coronary arteries. In fact, one of them was almost completely occluded. That could definitely kill someone. Plus, his heart was enlarged, so that sounds like something pretty bad.
3. Covid-19: Floyd had the disease some months before, and that could have made his lungs less compliant, which would make it harder for him to breathe.

What makes these ideas so farcical is that if Mr. Floyd had a perfect cardiopulmonary system, pristine coronary arteries, a drug-free analysis, and no previous Covid-19, he still would have died because someone was kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. But what is logically simple and clear to one person may be cloudy to another. I call this confused thinking. 

An example of confused thinking is the idea that Sandy Hook was a fabricated event, or that Covid-19 is a hoax. In the latter case, this would mean all the countries of the world; every government; every doctor and nurse in every ICU across the globe who claim to have taken care of Covid-19 patients; all the media reporters from the US to New Zealand to South Africa to Nigeria to Morocco to Italy to Sweden; all the hospitals and clinics in the world; all the EMS personnel who answered calls to Covid-stricken homes, and all the families who claim to have lost their loved ones to Covid--yes, all of these people got together and agreed to make up a disease that actually doesn't exist. Confused thinking.

Ugly undertones in the trial

Black people recognize when a racist slur is being raised, whether blatantly or subtly. For example, when cross-examining the black MMA witness, Nelson was bent on getting the man to admit that he (the witness), had been angry at the defendant, which was the reason for all the derogatory names the witness called Chauvin. In fact, it was outrage, not anger, but still, anger over someone being killed right in front of you would be a perfectly defensible reaction. But that wasn't the point. The point was to paint a picture of an "angry Black man" who was "distracting" Chauvin from his duties, somehow causing Chauvin to sustain the assault for more than nine minutes.

There were other racist-based notions put forward that were designed to engender negative feelings toward Floyd, even though it is not Floyd on trial, it is Chauvin. For example, the idea that Floyd was one of these worthless, inner city, criminal drug addicts. Nelson even suggested Floyd might have taken drugs intra-rectally, a baseless and rather offensive idea. Several jurors might have been repulsed by such an image, and once such an insinuation worms its way into the brain, it's hard to get it out. There's a double standard applied to drugs: when people of color use drugs, it's a crime (remember the 1980s?). When white people use drugs, it's an epidemic.

What the defense is trying to do is generate such a negative picture of Mr. Floyd that his murder somehow becomes justified. It represents the attempt to make the blameless become the blamed. "Yeah, I know it was kind of bad Floyd was killed . . . but you know he was a drug addict, right?" Confused thinking.

Anticipatory fear

Some may not see George Floyd's death in the same way African Americans do: a lynching. The only substantial difference between the old-style lynching by hanging and Floyd's killing is that he was horizontal on the ground instead of upright swinging from a tree by the neck. Michael Donald, currently featured in the CNN series The People Vs. The Klan, was hanged, but lynching is of course not restricted to hanging. Emmett Till's murderers beat him almost to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw is body into the Tallahatchie River. Mack Charles Parker was treated in much the same way by a white mob. James Byrd, Jr., was dragged to death after being tied to the back of a vehicle.

Lynching is by definition extra-judicial, but African Americans cannot but help conflating lynchings with killings by police officers, because we are all aware that in the United States South, police forces were originally designed to preserve the practice of slavery. Slave patrols were created to hunt down runaways and prevent revolts. So, the killing of George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and a host of other victims hearken back to those days, and generate a particular kind of anguish and despair among African Americans that others might find difficult to grasp. The reality remains to this day: it's nigh impossible to get a white police officer convicted for killing a black person. 

The anticipation or even the contemplation of a Derek Chauvin acquittal sets up incredible dread and apprehension in the minds of African Americans. It's the fear of reliving the profound psychological pain that will result if that scenario comes to pass and reliving the resulting demonstrations and unrest. And all the while, African Americans go back to that fundamental question: "Why, exactly, do they hate us so much?" 

The deadliest drug?

There’s been a massive shift in thinking in the United States over the past few years with respect to drug use.  Specifically, the use of marijuana, particularly for medical reasons, is becoming widely accepted.  And I’m pretty sure that it won’t be long before recreational use is also no longer prosecuted.

These changes have caused me to think about addiction, about how different substances affect people differently, such as tobacco and alcohol, and what society does about addictive substances.  It has also made me wonder whether legalizing recreational use of grass will lead to more people experimenting with more addictive drugs.

My reading and thoughts led me to a place I never expected – the notion that perhaps the deadliest drug that humans use – and I mean all humans – is probably sugar.  Not only has its agricultural harvesting and refining been the cause of the deaths of millions of slaves, but its ever increasing use (now between 30 and 40 kgs or 70 and 100 lbs per person in the USA per year) is almost certainly the prime cause of early death linked to diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and a variety of other conditions.

So why do we like sugar so much?

One theory is that we are genetically programmed to like it.  In fact, because we like it, we survived.  Way back when, perhaps 22 million years ago, apes lived in the trees of Africa, happily surviving off fruits and the fructose in them.  As the climate changed, and the seas receded, some of these apes left Africa and spread out over Asia and Europe.  With the onset of the Ice Ages, fruit-bearing trees started to die off, and the apes struggled to find enough to eat.  Those that survived were the ones that were able to process the fructose more efficiently.  In fact, a mutation occurred in some apes that allowed them to store the fructose as fat, enabling them to survive winters better.  The various descendents of these apes, including humans, carry this ability to create fat from sugar.

"Ah, sugar!"

The second part of the equation is that when we ingest sugar, we stimulate the same part of the brain that is affected by substances such as heroin and cocaine – the pleasure centre.  That is why we like foods with sugar, and why we have become addicted to sugar.

Pecan and Maple Danish pastry - no wonder the Danish are the happiest people on the planet
(Photo: Yohan Euan)

Variety of Danish pastries

Classic Sweet Roll

The interesting, but dark, history of sugar

The first use of (unrefined) sugar by humans was probably in New Guinea about ten thousand years ago.  They started to farm sugar cane, and enjoyed it by chewing on the cane stalks.  I remember doing exactly the same when I was a kid, when on vacation at the Indian Ocean coast near Durban in South Africa.  Over the next thousands of years, sugar cane spread slowly over much of India and South-East Asia.  But it was only in Chinese texts from about 800 BCE that the first reference is found – to sugar cane fields in India.

Sugar cane

Sugar cane

Indians in about 500 BCE began to boil sugar cane and pour the syrup into flat bowls where is hardened.  This new type of sugar was called khanda.  The word has survived in the form of candy.

The craving for sugar didn’t really blossom until about 400 CE, when the Imperial Guptas in India started making sugar in crystalline form, making it easy to transport.  In this form it was used as a medicine to cure impotence, stomach flutters, and headaches.  A couple of hundred years later, the use of sugar had spread to Persia, where the rich showed off their wealth by showering their guests with a variety of sweets or candies.

Sugar

When the Arabs invaded, they took with them the knowledge of sweets and how to make them, and it wasn’t long before sugar turned up wherever Allah was worshiped.  The Arabs made the creation of sweets an art, with marzipan being particularly popular.  In fact, one caliph commissioned a mosque to be made from marzipan.  They also turned it into an industry, which made sweet things more accessible to those with little money.

Not a marzipan mosque, but marzipan fruit

When the Crusaders returned to Western Europe, particularly England and France, they brought sugar with them.  That started a massive craving!  In order to get access to sugar, the Europeans had a few options: defeat the Arabs and so get access to the Far East’s plantations; import a meager amount from a few plantations around the Mediterranean Sea; or find somewhere where they could develop their own plantations and build their own refineries.

One can argue that a major motivator for European expansionism was the desire to have its own sugar sources.  Henry the Navigator sent sugar with settlers to Madeira in 1425, and Christopher Columbus took sugar with him to Hispaniola.  In fact, the first crop to be grown in places like Brazil and the Caribbean was sugar.  Little did they know that they would spark a new industry hundreds of years later for the manufacture of electric carts to move obese people around.

Harvesting sugar cane on the island of Réunion in the 1800s

With the explosion in the number of plantations and processing plants, the price of sugar went down and consumption went up.  Today the profile of sugar consumers has flipped.  Once it was the rich who consumed it; now it is predominantly the poor.

Why is it a DEADLY drug?

Producing refined sugar is a brutal job.  Not only does the sugar cane have to be harvested, usually with machetes, it then has to be transported and refined.  And all of this in climates that are hot and humid.  It is not surprising, therefore, that wherever sugar is produced, the laborers are from the lowest of classes, and usually from somewhere else.  In South Africa, our quite large indian population derives from those brought in during the Nineteenth Century to work the sugar cane fields.

When sugar was introduced in the Americas, vast areas of trees were cleared and sugar cane planted.  Initially, locals were use to harvest the cane, but mortality was very high and soon there weren’t enough people to maintain production.  So, guess what?  Slaves were imported from Africa.  Eventually eleven million slaves were shipped to the New World – to Brazil, to the Caribbean, and to the USA.  A a half of these worked on sugar plantations, and millions died. 

Slave

Slave auction

The process spread quickly, both because of rapidly increasing demand, but also because sugar cane quickly saps the earth of its nutrients.  So, once one location or island had ceased to become productive, the owners moved to the next, stripping the land, depleting the local population, and bringing in the next wave of slaves to toil and die in the fields.

Eventually the death rate was so great that even the Europeans weren’t able to ignore it, and the process towards the abolition of slavery began to gain steam.  Elizabeth Abbott, in Sugar: A Bittersweet History quotes Quaker leader William Fox, who told a crowd that for every pound of sugar, “we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh.” A slave in Voltaire’s Candide, missing both a hand and a leg, explains his mutilation: “When we work in the sugar mills and we catch our finger in the millstone, they cut off our hand; when we try to run away, they cut off a leg; both things have happened to me.  It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe.” 

Eventually, slavery was abolished, but those working in the fields, no longer technically slaves, still worked like them.

Of course, the second way sugar is so deadly is its effect on our health.  Doctors everywhere acknowledge that many serious and even fatal ailments are caused or exacerbated by sugar.  Part of the problem is that the sheer volume we take in has gown dramatically over the past hundred and fifty years with concomitant rises in the incidence of diabetes, blood pressure, and obesity.  One particular sugar that is called out is fructose, which with dextrose comprises table sugar, and is a major component of corn syrup.  Unlike other sugars, like dextrose, which are metabolized throughout the body, fructose is primarily absorbed by the liver.  When too much fructose is ingested, the liver turns the fructose into triglyceride fats.

Rich Cohen in his National Geographic article Sugar Love of August 2013 continues the story: 

Some of these fats stay in the liver, which over long exposure can turn fatty and dysfunctional. But a lot of the triglycerides are pushed out into the blood too. Over time, blood pressure goes up, and tissues become progressively more resistant to insulin. The pancreas responds by pouring out more insulin, trying to keep things in check. Eventually a condition known as metabolic syndrome kicks in, characterized by obesity, especially around the waist; high blood pressure; and other metabolic changes that, if not checked, can lead to type 2 diabetes, with a heightened danger of heart attack thrown in for good measure. As much as a third of the American adult population could meet the criteria for metabolic syndrome set by the National Institutes of Health.

Gadzooks!  I for one am cutting back on my sugar intake.

Stan - Thursday

 

The Company of Royal Adventurers

The very name smacks of romance and derring-do, exciting battles on the high seas, stalwart men, and brave deeds.  But there is another, ugly side to this coin.

 

Notice the little elephant under the royal image

The literal coin was gold—the one that gave English currency the name guinea.  The precious metal was brought to London by The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa (its full name, later called just Royal African Company).

The Stuart family, along with some London merchants,  chartered the group in 1660, just after Charles II was restored to the English throne.  He put his younger brother James, the Duke of York, in charge.   (James was also Duke of Albany.  See my post last week about the city of that name—here: http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/search?q=James+II )

James and his cohorts had as their goal the exploitation of African gold fields, which had been discovered during the British interregnum.  With the help of the King’s army and navy they soon set up forts on the West African coast, where they had the “right” to enforce martial law.  They divided their profits 50-50 with the King. 

Here comes the ugly part:  By 1672, they were taking not only gold and silver, but human beings as slaves.  Throughout the 1680’s they transported 5,000 slaves per year, most of them to the Caribbean and the American South.  For the first half of that infamous decade, they branded their human captives DY for the Duke of York.

After James ascended to the throne in 1685, they changed their branding irons to read RAC for Royal African Company.  Around one hundred thousand Africans got this “royal treatment” between 1672 and 1689.  The profits from this trade were a major contributor to the financial power of England.

By 1689, the RAC had lost its monopoly on the English slave trade, which by then included the Bristol merchants mentioned in my blog on that city (for which see http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/search?q=bristol)

In 1731, the RAC gave up the devil’s work and switched its trade to ivory and gold dust.  It was dissolved in 1752 and folded into the African Company of Merchants—a name that carries no gloss of romance and adventure.

Annamaria - Monday

Slavery

Officially, as every Brazilian schoolchild knows, it was abolished in this country on the 13^th of May, 1888.

That was the date upon which Princess Isabel, the daughter of Dom Pedro II, signed the Lei Áurea (Golden Law) that put an end, forever, to the practice in her father’s empire.

Or so the official story goes.

Now, if by slavery you mean the outright and legal ownership of one human being by another human being, the story is certainly true.

But, if you by slavery you mean a practice in which people are forced to exercise an activity against their will under the threat of starvation, or physical harm, or even murder, then it’s not.

This is one example of what it looks like.

And here’s another.

And still another.

It’s not that people are unaware of  the fact that modern agricultural slavery is currently going on in Brazil.. Here’s a recent cartoon on the subject:

On the left, it says, “Brazil,1723; Manoel, a slave, cuts sugarcane more than twelve hours a day. The only thing he receives in exchange for his labor is a roof over his head and food.”

On the right: “Brazil, 2011; Manoel, who isn’t a slave, cuts sugarcane twelve hours a day and receives, in exchange for his labor, money insufficient for his food and lodging.”

It’s a condition bringing suffering to young and old alike, and there are strict laws against it. 

But in certain more isolated parts of the country, the local landowners are more powerful than any law.

Here, for example, is how it generally works in the State of Amazonas:

Agricultural workers from surrounding states like Bahia, Piauí and Maranhão are recruited by people (called gatos - cats) who promise them good incomes and work conditions. Those who accept are loaded into buses and transported hundreds of kilometers to remote farms. And it’s only when they get there that they discover they’ve been sold a bill of goods.

Their every “expense” from initial transport, to lodging, to food, to medical care, to the tools they use for work, to small “luxuries” like soap, cigarettes and batteries for their radios are sold to them, on credit, at exorbitant rates.

With each successive payday, their debts to their employers rise.

And, if they attempt to flee, armed capatazes capture them, bring them back, beat them, sometimes even kill them to discourage others from committing the same “crime”.

Recently, the government has been rescuing about 4,000 people a year from this kind of servitude.

But no statistics exist to tell us how many are still out there, right now, still suffering this kind of abuse.

Leighton - Monday