Murder of George Floyd

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black American man, was killed by Derek Chauvin, a 44-year-old White Minneapolis police officer, after Floyd was arrested outside Cup Foods, a Minneapolis convenience store, following a report that he had used a counterfeit $20 bill. Officers J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane restrained Floyd on the ground, with Lane having earlier pointed a gun at Floyd before he was handcuffed, while officer Tou Thao kept bystanders from intervening. Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes while Floyd, handcuffed and lying face-down, repeatedly said he could not breathe. Floyd became unresponsive; Kueng found no pulse, and Chauvin did not remove his knee despite bystanders' pleas. Floyd was pronounced dead at 9:25 p.m. at Hennepin County Medical Center.

Videos filmed by bystanders and captured by security cameras became public the next day, and the Minneapolis Police Department fired all four officers on May 26, 2020. Two separate autopsies — one by the Hennepin County medical examiner and one commissioned by Floyd's family — along with a review by the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, concluded that Floyd's death was a homicide caused by restraint and neck compression.

Chauvin was charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter on May 29, 2020; the charge was upgraded to second-degree murder on June 3, 2020, when the other three officers were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter. A proposed plea deal for Chauvin fell through in mid-2020 after federal officials declined to approve it. Chauvin's state trial began March 8, 2021, and on April 20, 2021, a jury convicted him of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced on June 25, 2021, to 22.5 years in prison. In December 2021, Chauvin pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges related to Floyd's death and a separate 2017 incident, and was sentenced in July 2022 to 21 years, to run concurrently with his state sentence.

The other three officers were federally indicted on civil rights charges in May 2021. Kueng, Lane, and Thao were tried together in federal court and, in February 2022, all three were convicted of willfully violating Floyd's civil rights by failing to provide medical care; Kueng and Thao were also convicted of failing to intervene against Chauvin's use of force. They were sentenced in mid-2022 to federal prison terms ranging from 2.5 to 3.5 years. On separate state charges, Lane pleaded guilty in May 2022 to aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter and was sentenced in September 2022 to three years, to run concurrently with his federal term. Kueng pleaded guilty to the same state charge in October 2022 and was sentenced in December 2022 to three and a half years, also concurrent. Thao waived a jury trial in favor of an evidentiary review by a judge and was found guilty in a written verdict on May 2, 2023, receiving a sentence of four and three-quarter years in August 2023.

In March 2021, the City of Minneapolis agreed to pay Floyd's family $27 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit, described by the family's attorney as the largest pre-trial settlement of its kind in U.S. history at the time. Floyd's death triggered large-scale protests worldwide against police brutality, racism, and lack of police accountability, and led to state and federal civil rights investigations into the Minneapolis Police Department.