Note: This column first appeared on Cashill’s substack.
Assistant Minneapolis Police Chief Katie Blackwell made the classic mistake of suing a truth teller for defamation, namely the intrepid Liz Collin of Alpha News. In her book,
“They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, And The Death of George Floyd,” and in her documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” Collin claimed Blackwell may have lied on the witness stand by stating that Derek Chauvin’s use of force on George Floyd in 2020 was improvised and unauthorized.
In Minneapolis, Blackwell had every reason to expect a stacked deck, but Collin held all the cards. The court filings of her and her co-defendants, as reported by the Minnesota Star Tribune, “included sworn declarations from 33 former MPD officers who served with Blackwell and an officer still on staff. Those officers alleged that the restraint used by Chauvin on Floyd was part of department training.” Fourteen of those went so far as to allege “Blackwell committed perjury when she testified at Chauvin’s criminal trial.”
In a stinging 58-page order, Hennepin County Judge Edward Wahl soundly rejected Blackwell’s suit. Collin and her co-defendants, he wrote, “hit every legal standard necessary to avoid the lawsuit going to trial – including that their questioning of whether Blackwell lied on the witness stand met the legal standard of ‘substantial truth.’”
Last month, Wahl dismissed Blackwell’s lawsuit and ordered her to pay the defendants $75,000 in attorney fees. This past week, Blackwell accepted the dismissal of her defamation suit and agreed to pay the $75,000. This story has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves.
As it happens, this lawsuit was the first defamation case to be filed since Gov. Tim Walz signed the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA) in 2024. That law is meant “to limit frivolous lawsuits that seek to undermine the public discourse.” Thanks to the law, the Minnesota public now know how badly Chauvin and his colleagues were railroaded. The ball is now in Walz’s court.
The key exchange in the spring 2021 Chauvin trial revolved around Exhibit 17, a still image of Chauvin with his knee on the back of Floyd’s neck. When the prosecutor, pointing to the image of Chauvin, asked how his restraint differed from those the MPD authorized, Blackwell responded, “I don’t know what kind of improvised position that is. So that’s not what we train.”
Wahl did everything short of calling Blackwell a liar. “Her answer reasonably invites viewers, jurors, and now the public to conclude that the depicted technique was never trained by MPD.” He added, “That impression is undermined by evidence in the record showing that MPD training materials from 2018-2019 – the period of Blackwell’s tenure – included images of officers applying knees to the neck or upper back.”
At the trial, Blackwell seems to have been parroting the party line. When questioned about the same exhibit, MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo testified at the trial, “That is not part of our policy, that is not what we teach and that should not be condoned.” It seems likely that Arradondo fed this same line to Mayor Jacob Frey who told the public just two days after Floyd’s death, “That particular technique that was used was not authorized by the MPD. It is not something that officers are trained in on. And should not be used period.”
Former Minneapolis Police Officer Tuo Thao had a lot to say about this grand deception. Five years ago this month, after calling for an EMT, Thao held off a mob of angry protesters while his partner Derek Chauvin and two rookie colleagues, Thomas Lane and Alex Keung, struggled to subdue the massive, juiced up Floyd.
Thao, a first generation Cambodian-American and 9-year MPD veteran, is now serving out the final 6 months of a 57-month sentence for aiding and abetting second degree manslaughter. One could understand if he were bitter at lead officer Chauvin for getting him into this jam, but Thao has a clearer perspective on his fate than every Democrat official in America and most Republicans.
As Thao told Liz Collin on a monitored prison phone line, “I’ll put it this way, if it were my knees on the back of Floyd’s neck or black officer Keung’s knees, or Black Chief’s Arradondo’s knees, but for Derek being born white, we’d all still be patrolling the city of Minneapolis.” Thao had particular contempt for apparent DEI hires Arradondo and Blackwell. “They lied the entire time,” said Thao, “probably to cover themselves.”
As Thao knows, the medical evidence used to convict Chauvin was even more corrupt than the trial testimony of Blackwell and Arradondo. In November 2020 an exhibit surfaced in Thao’s case that should have resulted in a new trial for Chauvin and pardons for Thao and the other two officers.
The exhibit memorialized a November 2020 conference between former DC Chief Medical Examiner Roger Mitchell and several Minnesota state prosecutors. The memorandum detailed Mitchell’s effort to coerce Hennepin County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker into altering his diagnosis of Floyd’s death.
Baker conducted an autopsy on Floyd on May 26, 2020, the day after Floyd died. Baker reported that same day to the Hennepin County prosecutors, “The autopsy revealed no physical evidence suggesting that Mr. Floyd died of asphyxiation. Mr. Floyd did not exhibit signs of petechiae, damage to his airways or thyroid, brain bleeding, bone injuries, or internal bruising.”
Thanks to documents filed by former Hennepin County prosecutor Amy Sweasy in a sexual harassment suit dating from August 2021, we know more about Baker’s state of mind. “I called Dr. Baker early that morning to tell him about the case and to ask him if he would perform the autopsy on Mr. Floyd,” said Sweasy under oath. “He called me later in the day on that Tuesday and he told me that there were no medical findings that showed any injury to the vital structures of Mr. Floyd’s neck. There were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation.”
By day two, Baker knew the risks involved in telling the truth. Sweasy continued, “He said to me, ‘Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn’t match up with the public narrative that everyone’s already decided on?’ And then he said, ‘This is the kind of case that ends careers.’”
For the time being, Baker held firm. Four days after Floyd’s death — Friday, May 29 — the state filed its initial complaint against Derek Chauvin. According to the complaint, “The autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.” Without a diagnosis of asphyxia, however, the state could not accuse Chauvin and the police officers of committing or abetting “Murder-2nd Degree.” This is where Mitchell came into play.
A well-connected black political activist, Mitchell boasted of his involvement in Baker’s diagnosis to the state attorneys. Their summary of that interaction reads in part: “When the preliminary result came out via the criminal complaint, Mitchell found the statement was bizarre….Baker said that he didn’t think the neck compression played a part and that he didn’t find petechiae. Mitchell said but you know you can not have petechiae and still have asphyxia and can still have neck compression.”
Mitchell first called Baker on Friday, May 29. He “thought about it more that weekend” and on Monday he called Baker back telling him he was about to send an op-ed to the Washington Post critical of Baker’s findings. “In this conversation,” the memo continued, “Mitchell said, you don’t want to be the medical examiner who tells everyone they didn’t see what they saw. You don’t want to be the smartest person in the room and be wrong.”
By that Monday cities across America had gone up in flames, none more catastrophically than Minneapolis. The ever thoughtful Mitchell showed Baker a way out of the jam. According to the memorandum, “[Mitchell] said there was a way to articulate the cause and manner of death that ensures you are telling the truth about what you are observing on the body and via all of the investigation. Mitchell said neck compression has to be in the diagnosis.”
Late on that same Monday, Baker’s office sent out a press release that began, “Cause of death: Cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” (Italics added). With a stroke of the pen and the complicity of the prosecutors, Baker turned four innocent cops into murderers and justified the self-destructive social revolution that followed.
The Minnesota Star Tribune is Minnesota’s largest newspaper. To their credit, editors have shared the information about the Blackwell case with the public. Walz, Frey, and Attorney General Keith Ellison can no longer claim ignorance about the deceptions at trial.
The case is collapsing. Here is a quick summary of what these public servants should know: Mitchell coerced Baker into altering the autopsy report to include “neck compression.” Key witnesses Arradondo and Blackwell flagrantly deceived the jury about the legality of the restraint Chauvin used. Judge Peter Cahill did not allow the jurors to see the MPD training manual and slides that would have exonerated Chauvin. Nor did Cahill sequester the jury despite the threatening trial environment.
Then too, public officials from Mayor Frey on up poisoned the jury pool with insinuations of Chauvin’s guilt. Worse, the Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously to pay Floyd’s family $27 million in the middle of jury selection.
None of these injustices, however, could match what Thao knew to be the fatal corruption at the heart of the case: there would have been no case, no trial. no convictions—no riots— if what President Biden called “the knee on the neck of black America” had been something other than white.
Note: This column first appeared on Cashill’s substack. Please subscribe.