Derek Chauvin Allowed to Examine George Floyd’s Heart Tissue in Challenge to Federal Conviction

Derek Chauvin’s legal team will be permitted to examine heart tissue and fluid samples taken from George Floyd’s autopsy for an appeal of the former Minneapolis officer’s federal civil rights conviction based on a medical theory that Chauvin did not cause Floyd’s death.

U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson on Monday granted a motion from Chauvin to inspect the evidence as part of a claim that a heart condition, and not Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck, killed Floyd during a May 2020 police encounter that sparked widespread civil unrest.

Chauvin, who is serving state and federal prison sentences in excess of 20 years, is seeking to overturn his 2022 federal civil rights conviction over “ineffective assistance of counsel.” Chauvin is arguing that his original defense attorney, Eric Nelson, failed to inform him that a forensic pathologist based in Topeka, Kan., told Nelson he did not think Chauvin caused Floyd’s death.

Chauvin added that Nelson failed to seek testing of heart tissue samples that Dr. William Schaetzel believed would show evidence of a heart condition called takotsubo cardiomyopathy.

“Given the significant nature of the criminal case that Mr. Chauvin was convicted of, and given that the discovery that Mr. Chauvin seeks could support Dr. Schaetzel’s opinion of how Mr. Floyd died, the Court finds that there is good cause to allow Mr. Chauvin to take the discovery that he seeks,” Magnuson wrote in Monday’s order.

Magnuson wrote that Chauvin’s defense team may take discovery of any histology slides of Floyd’s heart, tissue samples of his heart, tissue blocks containing heart tissue from Floyd and recut sections of all autopsy tissue slides relating to his heart.

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