The police officer who held his knee to George Floyd's neck had previous excessive force complaints, and several media outlets reported Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., had declined to prosecute him in 2006.
Klobuchar was a state prosecutor in Minneapolis for eight years and declined to prosecute multiple officers for excessive force, according to The Washington Post, including Derick Chauvin, The Guardian reported.
Klobuchar, being vetted to be Joe Biden's potential running mate, "declined to prosecute police accused of using excessive force against black suspects," the Post reported March 21, 2019.
But, Klobuchar told CNN on Tuesday this case is "crying out for some kind of a charge" against the four fired Minneapolis officers, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported.
Chauvin was fired this week after he refused to remove his knee from Floyd's neck, despite pleas for mercy, leading to the death of the unarmed 46-year-old black man.
Floyd's death has sparked looting and rioting in Mineapolis and around the U.S.
Chauvin had at least 10 conduct complaints in his 19 years, a police database showed, according to reports. Among the cases, Chauvin was involved in the shooting of a man who had stabbed people before attacking police.
Klobuchar passed on Chauvin's prosecution in 2006, while she was running for Senate, and the case was investigated when she took office in January 2007 and ultimately went to a grand jury that declined to prosecutive, according to the report.
Chauvin also shot and wounded a Native American man in 2011 and was placed on leave, per the report.
"As chief prosecutor for Minnesota's most populous county from 1999 to 2007, Klobuchar declined to bring charges in more than two dozen cases in which people were killed in encounters with police," the Post reported March 2019.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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