Outside Court, Legal Analysis is a Jigsaw Puzzle with Half its Pieces Missing
Given the immense attention the George Floyd killing is receiving, there’s inevitably some amateur interest in investigating the matter.
In case you’re contemplating this, know it will be a massive waste of your time.
I guarantee that despite the overwhelming attention and scrutiny this case has received, you will NOT have all the relevant evidence. I say this from experience in handling criminal cases. There is an avalanche of discovery that only a few people have seen and some that the public may potentially never see. You will expend a ton of time and energy trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where the majority of pieces are missing.
To illustrate just how much of an information gap you're running on, I'll highlight one of my current cases. It was a relatively high-profile gunfight that erupted outside of a nightclub and involved 40-50 shots fired across 30 seconds or so. It definitely made the news but only some details were made public. I am currently sitting on a dump truck full of discovery from the case. A sample:
Laser scan of the entire crime scene from 6 different vantage points, with each bullet ricochet, empty beer bottle (potential DNA source), cigarette butt, crumpled paper, etc. that was found in the scene tagged and indexed. A laser scanner is a device that sits on a tripod and creates a 3D copy of whatever environment it's in. It allows pinpoint precision in cataloguing all the evidence found on the scene.
Approximately 12 hours of video footage from each of the 30 or so cameras that happened to be in the area. Surveillance cameras have proliferated to an absurd degree because they're so cheap. And because this happened in an alley, there were a bunch of cameras that just happened to be pointed at the right angle. I've had to watch hours and hours of this and it's amazing how thorough and particular of a narrative I can construct about nearly everyone that attended this nightclub. Like, here is bob arriving with two women, two hours later here is bob arguing with one of the women who is leaving, soon after that he is pacing back and forth and talking on the phone agitated, etc. I can do this with every single person who was in the area because the camera coverage was so fucking overwhelming.
Thousands of pictures of the inside of the nightclub, including photos of trash can contents, lost ID cards, and even a notepad with hundreds of names and numbers that the security guard seemed to have (That last one is haunting me because I have no idea what it means). Because the area was put on lockdown, I also have photos of everyone who got stuck inside the club as they were let out by police.
Hundreds of hours of recorded phone calls made by some of the suspects while they were in jail.
Comprehensive data dumps from multiple phones, either held by suspects or surrendered by accomplices. What I mean by this is literally the entire contents of a phone. Every single email, every single photo, every single text message. Everything everything everything just extracted from multiple phones.
Thousands of pages of medical records from multiple hospital stays, including x-rays, MRI results, and notes from every single nursing interaction.
I could go on but hopefully you get the point. Keep in mind that my case isn't even a murder investigation, which would increase the available and collected evidence by a magnitude.
You will be operating on a severe informational deficit. You don't have all the information and you never will, so any conclusion you reach will necessarily be faulty. Don't bother.