Tou Thao has testified he merely served as a “human traffic cone” when he held back concerned bystanders who gathered as former Officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, knelt on Floyd’s neck for 9½ minutes while the Black man pleaded for his life on May 25, 2020.Floyd’s killing touched off protests worldwide and forced a national reckoning of police brutality and racism.
“There is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Thao’s actions were objectively unreasonable from the perspective of a reasonable police officer, when viewed under the totality of the circumstances,” Cahill wrote. Thao rejected a plea bargain on the state charge, saying “it would be lying” to plead guilty when he didn’t think he was in the wrong. He instead agreed to let Cahill decide the case based on evidence from Chauvin’s 2021 murder trial and the federal civil rights trial in 2022 of Thao and former Officers Thomas Lane and J. Alexander.
Minnesota guidelines recommend a four-year sentence on the manslaughter count, which Thao would serve at the same time as his 3 1/2-year sentence for his federal civil rights conviction, which an appeals court upheld on Friday. But Cahill has some latitude and could hand down a sentence from 41 to 57 months.