By Jonathan Allen
ST. PAUL, Minn. (Reuters) – Restraining George Floyd face down on a Minneapolis road in a May 2020 arrest seemed reasonable in the moment, Thomas Lane, one of three former Minneapolis police officers on trial for violating the handcuffed Black man’s civil rights, testified on Monday.
Lane was the third of the three defendants to take the stand in his own defense at the federal trial in the U.S. District Court in St. Paul, charged with denying Floyd’s right to receive medical aid once in police custody.
Calmly answering questions from his lawyer Earl Gray, Lane told the jury how he had called over the radio for an ambulance to come after seeing Floyd’s mouth was bleeding after he struggled against Lane and another officer trying to get him in the back of a police car.
His co-defendants Tou Thao, 36, and J. Alexander Kueng, 28, took the stand last week to say they deferred to the authority of Derek Chauvin, the most senior officer at the scene. Lane and Kueng were rookies only a few days out of training.
Cellphone video of Chauvin, who is white, kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while Floyd begged for his life triggered huge protests against racism and police brutality. Chauvin was convicted in a separate state trial last year of murdering Floyd and sentenced to 22-1/2 years in prison, and in December he pleaded guilty to the federal charges of violating Floyd’s civil rights.
Prosecutors have said the officers have a duty of care to anyone in their custody, and the three men breached their training and common sense in not doing more to help Floyd.
Lane, 38, can be heard on body-worn camera videos asking his colleagues if they should roll the prone Floyd onto his side, something officers are trained to do to avoid positional asphyxia.
Chauvin, 45, rebuffs the suggestion, and continues to kneel on Floyd’s neck as Floyd falls motionless while bystanders scream at the officers to check his pulse.
“OK, I suppose so,” Lane recalled responding. “It just seemed reasonable at the time. This guy is out of control.” He said he believed the ambulance would be “here any minute.”
Prosecutors have previously called medical experts who said Floyd would almost certainly had lived if rolled on his side once he had been restrained.
Thao and Kueng face an additional count of violating Floyd’s rights in their role of police officers by failing to intervene to stop Chauvin’s use of excessive force.
Both have said they assumed Chauvin knew what was he was doing from his nearly two decades on the force and did not realize the force was excessive.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Alistair Bell)
