Minnesota prosecutors acknowledged Wednesday that a Minneapolis police officer had his knee on the neck of George Floyd for 7 minutes, 46 seconds—not the 8:46 that has become a symbol of police brutality—but said the one-minute error would have no impact on the criminal case against four officers, the AP reports. The initial May 29 complaint alleges Derek Chauvin “had his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in total. Two minutes and 53 seconds of this was after Mr. Floyd was non-responsive.” But timestamps cited in the document’s description of the incident, much of which is caught on video, showed Chauvin had his knee on Floyd for 7 minutes, 46 seconds, including 1 minute, 53 seconds after Floyd appeared to stop breathing.
“These kinds of technical matters can be handled in future amendments to the criminal complaint if other reasons make it necessary to amend the complaint between now and any trials,” Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman’s office said in a statement. “The one minute error made no difference in the decision to charge nor in the continuing legal hearings.” It will likely also make no difference to protesters who are using the timeframe symbolically, one activist says: “A one-minute difference is not significant in the grand scheme of things,” said Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights activist and former head of the Minneapolis NAACP. “The bottom line is, it was more than enough time for Derek Chauvin to know that he was literally choking the life out of George Floyd.”
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