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March 29, 2021, 6:07 p.m. ET 6 hours ago

By Will Wright

Takeaways from the first day of the Derek Chauvin trial.

One of the most closely watched court cases in decades got underway on Monday as the murder trial began for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer, who is being charged with murder in the death of George Floyd.

A long day in court began with the prosecution’s opening remarks, focusing the jury’s attention on the bystander video of Mr. Floyd’s death — all nine minutes and 29 seconds of it — and ended with the testimony of a mixed martial arts fighter who was on the scene and said he believed Mr. Chauvin was killing Mr. Floyd. In between, the defense laid out its theory of the case, vowing to prove over the course of the trial that Mr. Floyd died of a drug overdose and heart condition.

Here’s what happened.

The trial began with opening statements from both sides, laying the groundwork for both teams as they make their case to the jury pool. Prosecuting attorney Jerry W. Blackwell aimed to focus the jurors’ attention on the famous video of Mr. Floyd’s arrest, which sparked a wave of protests across the country this summer. The video, taken by a bystander, showed Mr. Chauvin kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s neck, where he remained for about 9 minutes and 30 seconds. “You can believe your eyes, that it’s homicide — it’s murder,” Mr. Blackwell said, adding that the trial was “about Derek Chauvin,” not the police in general.

Defense attorneys for Mr. Chauvin laid out their strategy as well — one that will ask jurors to consider heaps of evidence outside of the video itself. Eric Nelson, the lawyer for Mr. Chauvin, said there are more than 50,000 items in evidence and told jurors that the case “is clearly more than about 9 minutes and 29 seconds.”

The state also made clear another point: that Mr. Floyd’s exact cause of death will prove to be one of the most crucial points of this trial. In its opening statement, the prosecution (not the defense, as previously reported) said it would call seven medical experts, in addition to the Hennepin County medical examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, who performed the only autopsy on Mr. Floyd and classified it as a homicide.

Witnesses, including a cashier at a gas station across the street who filmed the encounter and a 911 dispatcher, also described their actions during the time that Mr. Floyd was arrested. “My instincts were telling me that something’s wrong,” said Jena Scurry, the 911 dispatcher, who alerted a supervising sergeant about what was happening. But she was circumspect about what exactly she thought was wrong; she said she thought officers may have needed reinforcements.

Outside the courthouse, the amount of public interest in the trial was laid bare, as protesters gathered and a helicopter whirled overhead. Temporary concrete and metal barricades encircled some of the government buildings downtown, while national guard members and state police officers stood by. Ben Crump, a lawyer for Mr. Floyd’s family, told supporters on Monday that “the whole world is watching.”

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making sense of America’s gun violence problem turns out to be a fairly straightforward proposition.

393 million: That’s how many guns the United States has, according to a 2018 Small Arms Survey, more than one gun per American and about 46 percent of all civilian-owned firearms in the world. And it’s the only variable that can explain America’s high rate of mass shootings: As my colleagues Max Fisher and Josh Keller pointed out back in 2017, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches this same conclusion.
The same can be said for gun deaths in general, of which mass shootings account for only a tiny fraction. As German Lopez has explained in Vox, “When researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America’s high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the U.S. is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.”

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The tyranny of the minority

There are other reasons policy doesn’t follow public opinion, and some of them are inherent in the very structure of American government. The Senate, for example, by giving equal representation to every state, militates against majority rule. As Harry L. Wilson writes in The Conversation, “California and New York, the first and fourth largest states and ones that favor stricter gun laws, comprise about 18 percent of the population of the United States but only 4 percent of the senators.”

Already a counter-majoritarian institution, the Senate was made even more so by the rise of the modern filibuster in the 20th century, which allows a minority to block majority-supported legislation. That means most substantive legislation must get 60 votes in the Senate to pass — often an exceedingly difficult threshold to reach.

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Trump Finally Admits His Campaign Colluded With Russia At Trump Tower Meeting

The latest version of the 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer basically undercuts numerous Trump claims.

WASHINGTON ? Forty times President Donald Trump has posted statements on Twitter asserting “NO COLLUSION” with Russia during the 2016 election. He made the claim standing next to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last month, and then a day later during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.

Sunday, he negated all of that by admitting that his campaign had tried to collude with Russia to win the presidency, after all.

Trump wrote in an 8:35 a.m. post on Twitter that the purpose of a June 9, 2016, gathering at Trump Tower was “to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics ? and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”

That new admission, however, is completely at odds with the statement Trump crafted for use in the July 2017 news story that first reported the Trump Tower meeting. In that statement, he falsely claimed that the session attended by his eldest son and other high-ranking campaign aides was “primarily” about the adoption of Russian children.

“Donald Trump is every attorney’s worst nightmare,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican political consultant and prominent Trump critic. “He combines a complete lack of personal discipline with an impulse to place himself at ever greater risk of prosecution. He’s the ‘Bad Idea Jeans’ of presidents.”

Just a half hour after Trump’s new tweet, Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow admitted that he had put out falsehoods last year when he also claimed that the meeting was about adoption.

“I had bad information at that time and made a mistake in my statement,” he said on ABC’s “This Week” program, before continuing attacks on the integrity of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in U.S. politics, a strategy Trump personally began from the time he took office.

Sekulow ? whose career has made him an expert on school voucher and religious freedom cases, not criminal law – claimed that meeting with Russians tied to their country’s government with the goal of getting assistance to win a U.S. election was not illegal.

“The question is how would it be illegal?” Sekulow said. “The question is, what law, statute or rule or regulation has been violated? No one has pointed to one.”

In reality, numerous criminal lawyers have pointed out that colluding with a foreign power to win an election or even attempting to do so may constitute conspiracy against the United States.

That Sekulow had misstated the origin of the July 2017 statement provided to The New York Times and attributed to Donald Trump Jr. became clear earlier this year, in a leaked letter from Trump’s legal team to Mueller’s office. In it, lawyers stated that Trump had dictated the statement written aboard Air Force One as it flew back from the G-20 summit in Germany. At the time, Trump and his White House had falsely claimed that he had only offered his input into the crafting of the statement.

While Trump has claimed since taking office that “no collusion” occurred between his campaign and Russia and that Mueller was conducting a “witch hunt,” Trump’s acceptance of Russian help has been out in the open since the final month of the 2016 campaign.

Throughout that October, Trump cited emails disseminated by WikiLeaks on a near daily basis ? even though he began receiving briefings in August 2016 that told him that U.S. intelligence agencies had determined those emails had been stolen by Russian spies. U.S. intelligence made that assessment public in an Oct. 7 statement.