 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds, one reason. Who's right about the death of George Floyd? Asking questions. And on this show, we do ask many questions, but we also try to provide answers when we can, and hope to today. I'm Zach Weissmuller, Senior Producer for Reason, and my co-host is Reason Associate Editor Liz Wolfe. Hey, Liz. Hey, Zach. They were hosting a conversation between journalist Radley Balco and writer Coleman Hughes. Hughes published an article in the Free Press in January called What Really Happened to George Floyd, in which he analyzes a documentary called The Fall of Minneapolis, which has racked up more than 6 million views. The documentary makes the case that police officer Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted of Floyd's murder. Hughes ultimately concludes that it's time for Americans to consider the possibility that Chauvin was not a murderer, but a scapegoat. Balco disagreed strongly and began publishing an extensive three-part rebuttal on his sub-stack, The Watch. The series, called the retconning of George Floyd, dismantles the purported errors and outright lies in the documentary and also heavily criticizes Coleman and the Free Press for failing to consult with experts or include research that Balco says could have helped them avoid serious mistakes. I'm grateful to both of them for agreeing to come on our show. I'm fans of both of their work and glad that we're here to have what may at times be a difficult conversation, but I hope it will also be a productive one. Radley, let's start with you. This documentary dropped in November 2023, but it seems to be Coleman's column in particular that really provoked you to respond. Bye. Yeah, well, I think it's because the Free Press is considered sort of a skeptical, non-partisan publication, or at least it positions itself that way, and I don't believe Coleman and I have ever met or personally, but we have a lot of colleagues and friends in common who speak highly of him. You know, I had watched this documentary gain a lot of momentum on the far right, among sort of police advocates, law enforcement advocates, and it wasn't until it started gaining momentum in kind of right of center libertarians, centrist circles. I know the fifth column podcast talked about it in a slightly skeptical, but mostly in a sort of way of endorsing a lot of its claims or at least giving credibility to them. And then Coleman really pushed into the mainstream and a lot of people who've read me for a long time started sending me Coleman's column and asking if I had a response to it. You know, when the series went up, Coleman's response and Barry Weiss' response to the Free Press was to basically to invite me onto their podcast to discuss it. And, you know, I agreed to do this podcast because I have history with Reeds, and I will say though, you know, the response to someone pointing out factual errors and errors of omission and publishing something that's deep, I think deeply misleading is not to debate and discuss those issues. It's to either issue a correction or a retraction or to explain why you don't think a retraction or correction is necessary. And so far, you know, the first installment of the series went up well over a month ago. I think the last one was 10, 12 days ago and there hasn't been a response. So, you know, I'm happy to discuss policing issues. I debate people who disagree with me all the time. I'm not really interested in having those discussions in the absence of good faith. And I think to sort of establish good faith or as a demonstration of good faith, you know, I think I need the Free Press or Coleman to, you know, address what I think are clear errors in the column before we, you know, go any further. So, you know, there's the maximal restraint technique problems in Coleman's column that, you know, amplify what I think are clear errors in the documentary. There are mistakes about positional asphyxia. The idea that, you know, it is because it's not mentioned in the original autopsy report, it couldn't have been the cause of death, which is not true at all. There's the fact, you know, Coleman really builds up Andrew Baker, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on George Floyd, but he never mentions that Baker said that Floyd's able to homicide and testified for the prosecution at Derek Chauvin's trial. When Coleman talks about Bob Crowell, the former union head and his wife was Colin, who is the narrator and produced the documentary. He talks about how they were intensively canceled, but doesn't mention Crowell's long history of abuse and allegations of racism and abuse. You know, I don't, I think you could very plausibly argue that that's an error of omission because Crowell wasn't a policymaking position. He was head of the Minneapolis Police Union. He formulated a lot of the policies that allowed Minneapolis police officers to have bad apples, the worst apples, to continue to abuse people without consequence. It was the union negotiated contract that allowed for a lot of those policies. And then finally, you know, he talks about Floyd's health, and he, we had exchanges on Twitter about this. He sort of, he claims he never wrote that Floyd died of an overdose or some sort of heart condition. He certainly implies that those contributed to his death or those might have contributed to his death. And we know, when we talk to addiction experts, emergency medical technicians, they'll tell you that the symptoms that Floyd was exhibiting and the way he was behaving in the video that we see are not consistent with somebody who's dying of an overdose or who's in the midst of a particularly an opioid overdose. You are, you basically become lethargic and, you know, sleepy and you sort of basically just kind of drift off. Floyd was animated. He was agitated. And, you know, multiple people who write about addiction have said that there's no evidence that Floyd was in the midst of an overdose. You know, Coleman also writes that he had fatal levels of fentanyl system and this is a claim we've seen often from the right and from law enforcement sources. And, you know, it came out in trial that his levels of fentanyl were, well, they were actually below the average level of people who were brought in for DWI charges for driving well under the influence of opioids in non-fatal cases. So his fentanyl levels were lower than those cases. And it also, there's also evidence that the fentanyl that was in his system was metabolized fentanyl. When you die of a drug overdose, it's shortly after you take the opioid the fatal amount, if most of the opioid in your system has been metabolized, that's a good sign that you aren't in the midst of an overdose. In his ratio of fentanyl to nor fentanyl, which is the metabolized form, was one point something I think in the average fatality, it's over nine. So it was, there's, you know, he had high levels of fentanyl compared to someone who has never taken opioids, but people build up a resistance to opioids when they take them regularly. And so there is no real fatal level of opioids. I mean, you know, Jacob Solom who's written a lot about this for a reason about people who take high dose opioids for chronic pain, some of them take 20, 30 pills a day, an amount that would pretty much instantly kill any of us, but because they built up a resistance. And we know that Floyd, you know, has a lifelong drug problem. So, you know, I think these are the issues that I think need to be addressed. And, you know, I would, I hope that Coleman and the free press will address them directly. We were talking before Coleman came on here, you know, I've been in journalism for 20 years. I've made a lot of mistakes over the course of my career. And I've, you know, I found that when you acknowledge them and correct them, you know, there's a hesitancy, I think, to make corrections because people think it erodes their credibility. But I think it actually adds to your credibility when you admit to mistakes because, you know, we're all, we all make mistakes. But so far I think the reaction I think has been a little disappointing. That makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate you laying out your, the case, Radley. You laid it out very well in the three-part series, but I also think that this is, you know, a pretty concise version for those who aren't going to read the entire thing. Coleman, is there anything that Radley has changed your mind about? Well, I want to first address some of the things that were said there, if you don't mind, at least in the abstract. Please. Maybe we can later go point by point, maybe in more detail. But broadly speaking, the free press piece that I wrote was intended to be op-ed length, ended up being a little over 2,000 words. And of necessity, I triaged information. Radley's response has been something like 30,000 words if you combine everything. And I think that should be the first signal for people that what you're talking about here aren't simple factual matters, right? A simple factual error. So for example, Radley made a minor and insignificant error just by getting my age wrong. It's correctable in a single sentence. The disagreements that we have here are generally matters of actual debate. And so I'm glad that we're doing this, but the fact that the free press hasn't issued a correction is not because we are hesitant to admit simple errors here. This is like a... Radley has done a kind of masterpiece of misreading of my free press piece. And I really encourage everyone to just actually read it because it's not very long. And there are just many claims and interpretations of it that make very little sense to me and things that I absolutely don't claim and never wrote. So for example, the idea that Floyd died of an overdose, you'll find that just nowhere in my piece. But there are two suggestions. I mean, I want to engage with this with some depth. There are two suggestions, I believe, in the text of your piece, Coleman, that do you mention possible fentanyl overdose, which I don't know, that sure seems like a suggestion that that is the explanation or is a possible explanation. So let me back up. In a normal debate, you have... Each side has a symmetric task, right? You try to summon more evidence than you that say guns are good, you try to summon more evidence than me that guns are bad, right? And to bring up remote possibilities constitutes a kind of grotesque just asking questions routine, not to name-check the show. But in the context of a criminal trial, the task assigned to each side is highly asymmetric on purpose, right? It's not enough for the majority of evidence to indicate guilt and it's not even enough for guilt to be highly and substantially more likely to be true because that's the clear and convincing evidence standard. It has to be the case that there's no other reasonable explanation that can come from the evidence presented at trial. That's the key concept of reasonable doubt. Now, when you make the debate asymmetric in that way, what would amount to a kind of just asking questions routine in another context becomes a perfectly legitimate line of thinking. Now, I want to actually zero in on what I said about fentanyl because I did not use the word overdose. I don't think anywhere in the column. What I said is that he had a potentially lethal dose. Now, the average dose found in someone that dies of fentanyl is 25 nanograms per milliliter. Floyd was found with 11 and overdose cases have been seen as lowest three. So he's around the 25th percentile of what you would expect if it were an overdose death. So to call it a fatal dose would suggest that anyone would die of it. That's why I didn't call it a fatal dose. But to call it a potentially fatal dose is a statement of fact. Now, in the context of what I was actually saying, and you can go back and read the column, I say that it's not unreasonable. I'm always speaking and talking through the language of reasonable doubt, not from the point of view of giving a definite version of events. So I say that it's not unreasonable to think that Chauvin killed him. I actually say this in the column where Radley takes me to be saying that Chauvin's actions definitely didn't kill him. In fact, I say the opposite. I say it's not unreasonable to think that, but it's also not unreasonable to think that there's another explanation of events here. And overdose was not actually the claim there. The claim was that it's not unreasonable to think that he died of a mix of preexisting conditions, drugs in his system, and adrenaline caused by the arrest, which was when push came to shove, when push came to shove, that was Andrew Baker's theory of the death. And so overdose appears nowhere. The idea that he could not possibly have died of positional asphyxia because it didn't appear in the autopsy, again, just appears nowhere in my column. In fact, I say it's not unreasonable to think he did die of Chauvin's actions. That's almost an exact quote. And so there is a kind of masterpiece of misreading of my column here. And I think not understanding that I'm looking at it from a reasonable doubt perspective rather than a normal debate is at the core of that misreading. Radley, how do you look at that? I mean, this is kind of the way Coleman has reacted to this entire exchange from the first post that I put up. I mean, he's clearly trying. He is literally just asking questions. I mean, that's what the whole column is. It's designed to sow doubt about what actually happened and to make people think that Chauvin was somehow railroaded. But there are clear factual errors. For example, he says that the maximal restraint technique was indeed... I'll give you the exact quote here. According to the documentary and documents I have reviewed, the move was indeed a standard hold called the maximal restraint technique, which the MPD trained its officers to use in situations where handcuff subjects are combative and still pose a threat to themselves, goes on and on and on. And he talks about how it's in the MPD use of force. And basically what he's saying is the technique that Chauvin is using on Floyd is the MRT, the maximal restraint technique, that is taught in the MPD manual. Well, he doesn't link to the version of the manual that was in effect at the time of Floyd's death. And in that manual, if you look it up, it does talk about the maximal restraint technique, but it says that it's only to be used in order to administer a device called a hobble, which is basically a way of incapacitating people, after which they're immediately supposed to roll the suspect over on their side into what's called a recovery position. And the reason for that is exactly what happened to George Floyd, the positional asphyxia. When someone is handcuffed and on their stomach, it's very easy to restrict their diaphragm in a way that does not allow them to breathe properly. Inhale air deeply enough into the lungs for the body to exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide. What happens is your oxygen levels then plummet, and your carbon dioxide levels soar, which becomes fatal pretty quickly. And this is exactly what the pulmonologists who testified for the state and other pulmonologists since would review the evidence that happened to Floyd. MRT is not, what Floyd, what Chauvin did to Floyd is not MRT, and Colvin definitively says that after he reviewed the documents and the evidence, it clearly was. It wasn't. And if he had read or if he had provided a link to the manual that he claims to have read and summarized in his column, I think readers would have seen pretty clearly that it wasn't either. It was claimed that that's what Chauvin was doing in the documentary. But in fact, in his appeal, even Chauvin's own attorneys abandoned this argument that Chauvin was trained on it. Or that basically Chauvin was trained on what we see in the video. In their appeal, they basically say that this technique was trained in general, and therefore what Chauvin did to Floyd was objectively reasonable. But they could not show that Chauvin was actually trained on this particular technique. Now, I'd argue, and I think most reasonable people who looked at the policy would argue, there's no evidence at all that the NBD trained its officers to do what Chauvin did to Floyd. They trained him to use a technique where you put a knee on the side of the neck. You put most of your weight on your foot, but you do that to keep the person in place just long enough to administer this device called a hobble, hobble, after which you're supposed to roll the suspect over to their side so they can breathe. That is not what we see in the video. We see that Floyd has held in that position for nine minutes, including almost three minutes after he loses consciousness. That isn't Chauvin NPD. It isn't taught in any police department in the country, and that is where Chauvin commits the actual crime here. Yeah, Radley, I think that this is the central to deciding this question and something that we need to catch our listening and viewing audience up on a little bit when you're talking about this debate over maximum restraint technique, which police call MRT. This is really what the case is decided on. I kind of see the entire fentanyl issue as a little bit of a red herring. Maybe Coleman disagrees because the fact is whatever was contributing to his inability to breathe, whether it was simply having someone exert pressure on his back or that in combination with whatever was in his system, if Chauvin was inappropriately restraining him in contradiction to the way he was trained, then that seems like the jury reached the proper verdict. And so we need to dig into that question. And I think the best way to do that is unfortunately to review some of the footage. I have watched this horrible tape a few times in preparation for this, and I don't like to play it, but I want to play just a little bit of it and go through. Can I respond to what Radley is saying here? Sure, go ahead and respond. And then we're going to look in detail at what actually transpired here. I'd like to get your thoughts on whether this technique was properly applied or not, Coleman. Okay, because Radley's argument has confused me from the start here. There's one argument that what Chauvin is doing just isn't MRT at all. If it's any trained technique, it's some other technique. And then there's a different incompatible argument that it is MRT, but it's improper MRT. So for example, at many points in your part one, you suggest that it's just not MRT at all. Yet the rest of your argument is that it didn't follow the guidelines of MRT properly, i.e. too much pressure. It wasn't indicated because of the situation. Floyd wasn't a threat. These are some of your arguments and so forth. All of which would be irrelevant if it's not MRT to begin with. In other words, it can't be bad MRT and also not MRT. And so I'm curious which arguments actually don't know which argument Radley's making. Let's look at this. Those things aren't contradictory at all. Let's look side by side. This is what the argument Radley makes in his piece is that this slide on the right, which is from the training is supposedly what Chauvin believed he was supposed to do. And was not admitted in trial. But what Radley points out is that when you zoom in on these pictures, you see that the officer who's restraining the suspect here has his weight on the ball of his foot. But you would acknowledge that this is MRT, right? No, it isn't. This is not MRT because you call it the MRT training slide. No, what Chauvin is doing to Floyd is not MRT. Okay, sorry. I'm talking about the training slide right now. The training slide is MRT or is it element of MRT? Do you agree with that or no? Yes. The NPD has acknowledged that that slide is part of the MRT training, correct? It also says on the slide, very specific explicitly that you're supposed to roll the suspect over into the recovery position as soon as possible. The policy manual also says the purpose of MRT is to administer a hobble and it's supposed to be temporary. It's not something you administer for nine minutes. I understand that. So, but here, okay, can we zoom in on the second picture on Chauvin's? Yes. So the argument is that he has more weight than the picture in the slide and therefore it's not MRT or rather it's improper MRT, right? All of his weight appears to be on the neck and also Radley is saying that this is an intermediate step to getting them in a recovery position and applying a restraining device called a hobble, which never happened. Therefore, this is negligent, criminally negligent behavior. Yeah, okay. So now, again, in the context of reasonable doubt the question is, is there another reasonable explanation? Now, I'm not going to say that Radley's is not a reasonable explanation, but that's not the burden of the defense. The burden of the defense is to show that there are reasonable other reasonable explanations. So as we know from the transcript, the moment they get George Floyd on the ground, Chauvin says to the partner, do you have a hobble? Or do you have a hobble? Two-tow goes to get the hobble, which he can't initially find. It's Thomas Lane's hobble. And then as he's looking for the hobble, Lane or someone else realizes that Floyd has blood on his mouth and needs EMS. So they call a code two for EMS. They hike it up to code three. Eventually, Tau finds the hobble. But now that they have EMS coming, Chauvin and Tau decide that actually we're not going to put on the hobble because it takes about two minutes to get on roughly. And when you have EMS coming, hiked up to code three, you reasonably assume EMS is three minutes away. We know that from the trial. And you'd have to take the hobble off in order to apply medical treatment to someone. You can't really put someone easily on a stretcher on their back in the hobble. So the Occam's razor explanation of the decision to, initially the decision to use the hobble and then the reversal is that they now had EMS coming. So they were going to hold for EMS. And then obviously what happened, which is not possible to see without 2020 hindsight, is that there was what two different, at least one of the firefighter witnesses for the prosecution. Agreed was an unheard of delay, almost unique and unheard of delay in fire's ability to get there because of a miscommunication with dispatch. And so that's one of the reasons why that's the reason why they didn't apply the hobble, right? Or rather that is certainly a reasonable explanation for why they didn't apply the hobble. Okay, but Coleman, let me play just a little bit of the video because that does not appear to be what happens in the video. It appears that they are asking to the other officers are repeatedly asking Chauvin to... You got your hobble. Put the hobble. Put the hobble. Put the hobble. Put the hobble. Put the hobble. There he is. Put the hobble. Put the hobble. There he is. Put the hobble. I can't hear what you're saying. Okay. I'm talking... Anyone can look up the transcript and confirm that this is what happened. Chauvin says, do you have a hobble? Toe Tao goes to get it, but by the time he gets it, the situation has changed because now they've decided to call EMS and EMS is on the way. And then Toe Tao asks again, well, do you need the hobble now? And they say, no, we've got EMS coming essentially. So at what point is it okay to continue to put your knee on George Floyd's back after he's gone limp, after one of your fellow officers tells you he can't find a pulse, after bystanders are telling you he can no longer... He can't breathe anymore. And then Chauvin continues to put weight on his back for another three minutes after that. Where's the confusion there? What's the Occam's razor explanation for continuing to put your full weight on a man who's slipped into unconsciousness? My point is that there are multiple explanations. One explanation would be that he's a psychopath, right? In a criminal trial, however, the presence of other reasonable explanations constitutes reasonable doubt. So one reasonable explanation is that they were trained as Johnny Marshall testified, who is the prosecution star witness on use of force and PD policy, that there are situations where you hold someone in the prone restraint, prone body weight restraint, and do not move them to the side recovery position until the code is quote, the scene is code four, meaning everything safe and everything under control. The scene is safe, right? And part of what they're taught is that when you have an angry crowd... It's hard to resist when you're unconscious. How does that mean the scene is safe? Code four does not merely include the resistance of the... They're not trained that code four only consists in a person not resisting, but also consists in a scene being secure and safe. When you have an angry, hostile crowd, they're taught that that's not necessarily code four. And as further evidence of that, when EMS, rather when paramedics arrived before the fire truck, the paramedics arrived whenever it was around 826, 827, they had two options. They could stay there and immediately start medical work on Floyd, or they can do, and we know this from trial, they can do what's called a load and go, where they get him in the ambulance and then move the ambulance somewhere safe. They chose to do a load and go because they perceived that the scene was not code four because of the angry crowd. In other words, if the paramedics perceived that it was not code four and chose to do a load and go, delaying giving medical aid to Floyd, then certainly the cops at the scene perceived that it wasn't code four, and their training is that there are situations where they can hold someone in prone restraint and not move to the side recovery until the scene is code four. So that is a reasonable explanation, not the only one, but in the context of a criminal trial, the presence of such a reasonable explanation can be itself exculpatory. It has to be. The key word there is reasonable. I don't think you can say because, I mean, literally the stillity of the crowd was people telling them that you are killing this man, trying to tell them, trying to warn them that what they were doing to Floyd was dangerous. As far as I know, nobody from the crowd struck into the officers, threw anything at the officers. They were literally telling them that what they were doing was killing George Floyd. If that's reason to continue to use the amount of force you're using, then just about any amount of force is going to be reasonable. I mean, Chauvin literally he ignored warnings from his fellow officers. He ignored warnings from bystanders. He ignored warnings from Floyd himself. I don't think you can say that because people saw what was happening and were angry about it, that gives you an excuse to continue doing what you're doing. So it's not a matter of what appears reasonable to you or me. It's a matter of whether he was doing something within training. So I have a few points to make here. One is, I don't think you can say it was unreasonable to worry about the safety of the scene when the paramedics who came decided on a loading go and delayed treatment because they perceived the scene. That was also after, but hold on, there's a sequence of events that I think matters here. That's after Chauvin had kept his weight on George Floyd's back for quite a long period of time. The paramedics assessment of the situation in its fullness is different than how the scene was merely four minutes prior. How do you factor that into it? The paramedics assessment, shouldn't it be gospel here? Well, the paramedics assessment, they're coming on a scene. They're seeing that there's a hostile, angry crowd. After the crowd was seemingly, without having been there, seemingly less hostile earlier in the act before it had become so clear that Chauvin... Two minutes or I mean, we're talking about three minutes. Three minutes difference? Yeah, three minutes. Yeah, no, three very consequential minutes. The crowd was... George Floyd was unconscious. The crowd was crescendoing throughout this. They peek one around the ambulance gets there. The paramedics assessment of the safety of the scene might have been different than the assessment of the safety of the scene three minutes prior, right? They seem to be peeking when they notice that he has gone limp. And that's one of the key questions that Bradley raises in his piece that I'd like you to answer just directly, which is that you did not mention in the piece that Chauvin kept kneeling on him after he went limp and had no pulse. Isn't that a pretty crucial piece of information? Okay, there's like four different arguments floating here I think I have to address. So that one right there, again, it's not a matter of what you or I think looks reasonable, right? It's a matter... We're talking about putting someone in prison for murder for an unlawful use of force. So it's a matter of whether they were authorized and trained to do certain things, right? And Marshall testified that they're trained that there are situations where you can hold someone you've just made unconscious even after they're unconscious, right? This is what they're trained that you can continue to hold someone in certain situations even after they're unconscious. And it's possible, there's a reasonable explanation where they're also trained to worry that someone who has just gone unconscious later comes back and starts fighting twice as hard. And this was all in the trial. This is all in their training. You keep referring to Marshall and saying this sort of thing that he testified to. By the way, they're also trained that if you're talking, you're breathing. I'm not saying that this is true. I'm not saying that you or I believe this. I'm saying that this is what they were trained on. But aren't they also trained on? That's a common myth in policing, but that's not what they're trained on. They're not trained on. The defense asked Johnny Marshall, have you been trained or do you train that if you're talking, you're breathing? And he said yes. You're taking hypothetical, deep hypotheticals. No, these are not deep hypotheticals. Here's what Marshall said. You don't train leg neck restraint with officers in service. And as far as I know, we never have. That's a direct quote from Marshall. When asked, you should use the least amount of force necessary to meet your goals. You can use a lower level force to meet your objectives. You're quoting from a different... Chauvin de Floyd is not taught by MPD. He explicitly said that. He said a lot of things. He also said that a knee on the neck is something that happens in use of force and is not unauthorized. That's a double negative. I was quoting from a different part of Marshall's where he was asked directly. You're quoting from a question the defense posed in the context of hypothetical deliberately to get him to say the kind of things that you're quoting him from now. When he was asked directly... No, it wasn't a hypothetical. Chauvin de Floyd, he said over and over again... It wasn't a hypothetical. It was a simple question. Do you teach or train or are you trained that if you're talking, you can breathe? That's... When he was asked specifically about what Chauvin de Floyd, he said over and over that it was not trained and that it was excessive force. Oh, and by the way, and Toe Tao also said in his BCA, I don't know if this is called the deposition or whatever, that yes, we're taught... If you can talk, you can breathe. I'm not saying this is good training, but that's part of my point is that if police officers are trained on all of these various things that you can hold someone in prone and not put them inside recovery position until the scene is Code 4 and that Code 4 consists of an angry and potentially building crowd. And again, we can't judge in 2020 hindsight. You have to understand that you have to allow for their worry that a crowd is building and it in fact was building. There was a time when police officers were trained and we thought you can breathe. It's not trained anymore and it hasn't been for a very long time. So I don't have the entire transcript in front of me which... It's not in the transcript, it's in the video. Johnny Mercell said this and Toe Tao said this. And they were both NPD and they weren't hypothetical questions. I want to cut through to a slightly different issue. I want to go to the positional asphyxia point in a moment and Zach will take us there. But one thing that keeps coming to mind as you guys both talk is Coleman, your description of your piece and your assessment of the facts seems to really be quite centered around the idea of whether or not this trial was conducted fairly. But the other component to this, which I think is important to consider here, is whether or not the fall of Minneapolis was a convincing piece of journalism, right? Because it's not just about the facts at hand in the trial. It's also about whether the fall of Minneapolis was good, because at least my interpretation of your piece, and please correct me if I'm wrong, was maybe not fawning of the documentary, the fall of Minneapolis, was certainly appreciative, certainly greeting it in a positive light, receiving it favorably. Whereas to me, it wasn't a very convincing piece of journalism, in part because of glaring conflicts of interest and glaring omissions. How do you reconcile that component of your piece? I'm not going to defend the documentary. I didn't make the documentary. The documentary provoked my free press piece, but it was not the evidentiary basis for it. It's not my claims, it's claims. You don't cite anything other than the documentary. You cite a bunch of different components. What do you mean I don't cite anything other than the documentary? How many hyperlinks are there? There are like dozens of hyperlinks. You didn't consult with any outside experts, any specialists. I mean, it's all based on claims. You actually don't make any claims that aren't also made in the documentary. That's definitely not true. I mean, that's actually not true. I definitely made claims that aren't made in the documentary. Yeah, well, maybe the better way to handle that is Coleman, which forensic analysis, like who did you, which forensic pathologist, which people who weren't used in the documentary did you consult with and did you find anything over the course of your reporting that really contradicted some of the narrative presented in the documentary? Look, I only, I watched the documentary. I've been paying attention to this case since 2020. The documentary provoked me writing the piece, but it was not, it was probably 5% of my research for the piece was watching the documentary in terms of my time spent. I didn't talk to lawyers in particular. I didn't talk to forensic pathologists, which I understand Balco falls me for, but most of it was reading and calls with lawyers making sure that I understand the legal and criminal law aspects of it. Did you find anything in the course of your research that cast doubt on anything that you'd seen in the fall of Minneapolis? What left you scratching your head being like, well, that is different than what they said. I totally disagree with their framing of that. There were definitely witnesses that seemed, I mean, there were some sort of claims about the FBI's involvement that I thought were strangely conspiratorial and suggestive and so forth, but my intention was not to do a review of the documentary. I think the nicest thing, if you want to call it that, I said about it was that it threw doubt on two claims, namely that Chauvin committed felony assault, which is one of the elements of felony murder, and that he caused Floyd's death, which the documentary did, however imperfectly. I don't think there were many misleading witnesses, misleading statements. If I would have to do a critique of the documentary separately to parse out my disagreements, but I don't remember off the top of my head everything. The other thing that I did want to ask just really fast because I do think you would be a reader, a casual reader would be forgiven for thinking that you somewhat endorse some of the conclusions come to you and the quality of journalism done by the fall of Minneapolis. One thing that struck me as a really glaring omission from your piece was your description of Liz Collin and Bob Crowell, her husband Liz Collin, the producer who played a massive role in making this documentary, and the fact that there wasn't really disclosure of her relationship with Bob Crowell, her husband who headed up the police union in Minneapolis and who also had a pretty stunning record of disciplinary reports as a police officer, including many, many allegations of improper treatment of people that he interacted with. I mean, how could you not represent that? Because at least, you know, I'm obviously a libertarian, I'm biased to be against public sector unions, but that conflict of interest seems really relevant. Well, the piece was about Chauvin's trial primarily, and as it was provoked by the documentary, I described the producer and the director of it. And again, it was a 2000-word piece. I gave a cursory explanation of who I understood them to be, and I don't think I had to go into a deep dive on who Bob Crowell was for the reader to get the, again, the thesis of my essay was that Chauvin was falsely convicted. So I don't think I understood that, but there is an entire paragraph. For not going on a side quest. There is a paragraph about Collin and Crowell, specifically Collin being pushed out of her job as a local news anchor, and they're being a public cancellation of this couple. And, you know, you literally say here... That's because she was the producer or director of the documentary. Had Bob Crowell been listed, I would have done something on him, too. But what I'm saying is to quote directly, both Crowell, from your piece, quote, both Crowell and Collin received an intense cancellation, including a protest outside their home, which led WCCO to push Collin out of her anchoring job and eventually led to her leaving WCCO and joining Alpha News. Okay, I'm sorry, but this is a portion. You're already devoting a significant chunk of airtime to this. And at least to me, I would feel misled if I got all the way through this piece and didn't get a sense of the fact that Bob Crowell has quite a record. In addition to being the police union leader, he also has a pretty significant record and lots of complaints against him, including several lawsuits. Okay, well, I consider that a difference between us because if I was reading a piece titled, what mine was titled, What Really Happened to George Floyd, I would not feel misled that it didn't go on a side quest about Bob Crowell. This is not a side quest. This is materially relevant to the quality of journalism produced because you simply have to disclose these types of relationships and this is not a simple cancellation where it's like, oh, I am as anti-cancelation as many people. You know that in our sort of corner. And to me, the way that this paragraph read was that Colin and Crowell were canceled for the heresy of possibly examining a revisionist narrative about George Floyd as opposed to the fact that Crowell is a very politically, he's a political lightning rod in Minneapolis. So I include the fact that he was head of the police union, right? Yeah. So does that not reveal the conflict of interest right there? I mean, you would already understand there that he's a cop. He may have a pro-cop bias. But you say cancellation, which certainly implies that he was removed from his position for things that he said. And what actually happened was there was a groundswell for him to be removed because he was in an actual policymaking position. He was a guy with a long disciplinary record, including record of abuse of force and allegations of racism. And he was in a position to set of the union where he was negotiating the very policies, the training policies that we're talking about here. So to say he was canceled implies he was, you know, attacked for his free speech. He was actually attacked for his record. Were those allegations of racism proven? Well, I mean, there are lots and lots of them, but part of the problem as I think you probably know if you read the DOJ report is surely there was a history of MPD of not holding officers accountable. Including not even investigating allegations. But yeah, I mean, the city settled several lawsuits involved use of force against him, which he had misused for us. Yeah, I'm more involved in the misuse of force allegations than the, you know, I guess white power motorcycle gang allegations, right? Like I'm more interested in the actual material harms he might have done to victims, including the settlements. Like all of these things just seem like an easy thing to hyperlink out or an easy thing to add a sentence about. Because I don't know. I could see why a wife of somebody who's in that position would want to make an exculpatory documentary over it. Maybe that's me being overly suspicious or overly cynical. But that conflict of interest just seems so important. I would argue that. I mean, I'll just say that on this question, I am more on Coleman's side. Like I feel like I got a sense of who Kroll was. And it's not, it wasn't as central to me to as the argument he was making and the, the, but, but the points that you're raising about sort of the similarity of the argument made by the documentary and made by Coleman. What I found persuasive about Radley's rebuttal to this was that both your argument and the documentary were a bit asymmetrical in terms of presenting the extent of training that Derek Chauvin likely was exposed to. And so like, you know, you're, you're raising these questions of like, could there have been other contributing factors to Floyd's death? Was there confusion about, you know, what he was supposed to do in that situation? But then, you know, Radley goes into great detail about this issue of positional asphyxia, which apparently is a well known problem among police departments. He embeds of 2013 NYPD video, training video, which we want to play a little bit of just so our viewers can get a sense of how kind of the, the, the main, what the mainstream theory is as to why George Floyd died in that position, whether or not Derek Chauvin's knee was on his neck or between his shoulder blades. It's more about the position that he was put in for several minutes. So let me just play a little bit of that video. And then I'd like to get you to respond to the idea that you kind of left this out of the argument. I'm Dr. Charles Hirsch. I'm the chief medical examiner of the city of New York. We first have to have a basic concept of the mechanics of respiration. And I'm going to show that to you with some graphic material. To begin with, the process of breathing in is accomplished by increasing the size of your chest. You do that in two ways. First, by raising your ribs and secondly, by contracting your diaphragm. When a person is face down on the street, in order to raise their ribs, they have to lift the weight of their body. Furthermore, if you're face down and your abdomen is compressed, it raises the abdominal contents and makes it more difficult for your diaphragm to contract. If, in addition to your own weight, you have someone else kneeling or laying on your back, that increases the amount of weight that you have to raise in order to increase the size of your chest. The greater the weight resting on the individual's back and the more severe the degree of compression, the more difficult it is for them to breathe in. What happens then occasionally is that the individual begins to have air hunger and oxygen deficiency. The natural reaction to that is to struggle more violently. The perception of those persons trying to subdue the individual is that he needs more compression to be subdued. You then enter a vicious cycle in which compression makes air hunger, air hunger makes a greater struggle and a greater struggle demands greater compression. So that kind of seems like the most straightforward explanation as to what happened here and that was from more than 20 years ago implying that this is a well-known problem among police departments. Isn't that fairly damning of Chauvin's behavior and why was that not included in your argument? So in my argument, I'll reiterate here, I said it's not unreasonable to think that Chauvin's actions caused the death of Floyd. That's close to or rather caused Floyd's labored breathing. I mean, that's close to an exact quote from my piece. I said it's not unreasonable. And the reason I said that is because it's not the defense's burden to disprove that positional asphyxia kilton. It's the prosecution's burden to say that there is no other reasonable explanation other than explanations that implicate Chauvin's actions. Now, I'm going to give you a reasonable explanation that doesn't implicate physical pressure from Chauvin onto Floyd. And that would be Dr. Andrew Baker's explanation for his death. Now, before I get to that, let me just deal with the manner of death versus cause of death issue. So, Radley, you fault me for not mentioning that the manner of death Dr. Baker found was homicide. And rather only talking about the cause of death. And you say in your piece, I think that the manner of death is a legal determination and cause of death is medical. Baker actually says the opposite twice in his testimony, but you may be using those words differently. So, I assume you're using those words differently than he is. But what Baker meant to convey by that is saying manner of death is irrelevant to the legal determination of homicide. He actually says they belong to two different worlds entirely, right? Cause of death, however, is entirely relevant because it's an element of the crime. In order for Chauvin to be convicted, Chauvin's actions had to be not just a but for cause, but according to the jury instructions, a substantial cause, which is a somewhat higher bar. And Baker's explanation of cause of death, which he explained multiple times in his testimony, was that when you combined Floyd's preexisting conditions, 90% constricting of one artery, 75% constricting of another, you combine his already weakened system to begin with, with the adrenaline caused by the arrest, his heart and lungs stopped working. So that explanation does not include physical pressure from Chauvin as a but for or a substantial cause of his death. That is also a reasonable explanation of what killed Floyd. So in the context of a criminal trial, that is exculpatory or ought to be. That isn't what he says. What he says in the cause of death is quote, that it was cardio pulmonary arrest, his heart and lungs stopped working. I'm talking about his testimony when he allowed law enforcement, subdural restraint and net compression. He talks about restraint and net compression in the cause of death in the actual autopsy report. Also, you know, I wanted to bring this up earlier. I do think it's deeply misleading to talk about Baker's autopsy as the only complete autopsy to contrast it to the one done by the men who was hired by Floyd's family, which I agree was flawed, but then not to include in your piece that Baker himself determined that the cause of death, excuse me, the manner of death was homicide and that he testified with prosecution. Both of those things don't, neither of those things appear in your piece. You sort of build them up as the sort of reasonable, sensible antidote to, you know, public hysteria about Derek Chauvin, but you don't mention that he did say it was a homicide and he did testify for the prosecution. Baker explained in his testimony, as I said, that manner of death is irrelevant to the legal determination of homicide. He said they belong to, quote, two different worlds entirely. Whereas the reason I talked about cause of death and didn't include manner of death is because cause of death is literally an element of the crime. That's what's germane here. You also say that positional asphyxia is mentioned in the autopsy report, which is also irrelevant. Sorry? You also say that positional asphyxia is not mentioned in the autopsy report, which pretty strongly suggests that you are arguing that positional asphyxia was not a potential cause of death here. No, that's not an accurate inference at all. Why would you say it wasn't mentioned in the autopsy report if you didn't want people to think it wasn't a possible cause of death? Why would I want them to draw that inference, but then elsewhere say in my essay, it's not unreasonable to think that Chauvin caused his labor-breathing? You're failing to understand, again, that my whole piece is from the perspective of reasonable doubt. I'm not claiming definitively that I know what killed Floyd. I'm not claiming to have a truth here. I'm claiming that in the context of a criminal trial, the presence of a reasonable explanation is itself exculpatory because of the asymmetric task assigned to the prosecution and defense. Your piece is a counter-narrative piece, though. The entire concept of it, as I see it, is to challenge two components of the traditional media narrative about George Floyd's death. I feel like you're doing a little bit of this throwing your hands up, possible deniability type thing. Can I clarify this? I've talked to most people who have been to law school, who read my piece, understood it completely differently than how many others understood it, because they're trained to think in terms of reasonable doubt. When I say things like, it's not unreasonable that Chauvin caused his breathing, but it's also not unreasonable that his breathing was caused by this, people who are sensitized to think in terms of reasonable doubt understand exactly what I'm saying. I'm not actually definitively ruling between these two things, but the presence of multiple explanations can accept multiple reasonable explanations is itself exculpatory in our system, whereas other people take me to be arguing for the second of those two interpretations as a definitive truth, which is not the defense's burden. I think it's close to the standard of collaboration to say most people who went to law school read your piece differently. I talked to a lot of lawyers who were not at all happy about your column. Also, there's the other component here, which is... They certainly wouldn't fault me for coming from a perspective of reasonable doubt. The other thing that's a little bit ironic here is that I don't think the free press exactly brands itself as the publication only to be read by those who have attended law school and successfully received their JD, right? That's not what I'm arguing. I'm not saying that it is, but I am saying that you're writing to a general audience, and so I wonder whether people should be faulted for taking it as one thing, and you're saying, well, really, there's a misunderstanding here, where a general audience, yes, they're not quite getting what I'm after, but those who have attended law school do understand what I'm getting after, and it's like, well, wait a second, then it's possibly not a successfully done piece if the vast majority of people perceive it as one. I wouldn't say the vast majority of people perceived it in the way that you're perceiving it. I guess I don't know what percentage it's a little bit more of a general audience publication. In fact, I thought it was a little bit of an antidote to sort of the elitism of the mainstream media, right? So again, pointing out that positional asphyxia, I don't think I said positional asphyxia wasn't in the autopsy, right? I said asphyxia in general. My reason for pointing that out, which is the genesis of this sidebar here, is that obviously asphyxia doesn't need to necessarily have signs on a corpse, right? Someone can die of asphyxia without there being signs of asphyxia. But in the context of a criminal trial again, where it's not a 50-50 debate and the defendant is presumed innocent, then it is relevant in the context of a criminal trial that the only complete autopsy ever done turned up no evidence of it. The entire burden is on the prosecution to prove that things happened beyond a reasonable doubt. So, Coleman, here's the thing. Positional asphyxia does not leave signs. I didn't say positional asphyxia. I know you didn't, because my guess is that you weren't aware of positional asphyxia before you wrote this. No, I very much was. You emphasized the fact that Chauvin's knee was not on Floyd's neck, which implies that you think that you have to restrict airways in order to die of asphyxia, which is common. It's what's promoted in the documentary. It's what lots of Chauvin promoters have said online over and over again. I only centered on that because it was the center of the media narrative. Okay, but that isn't what was argued at trial. If the point is that Chauvin didn't give it a trial, why wouldn't you argue asphyxia? It was also about the public conversation and public understanding of what happened. Bradley, could you explain that? Because I found your kind of historical digression into this term called birking very revelatory or illuminating in terms of understanding why putting pressure on someone's back or neck in that way would not necessarily show up in an autopsy. Could you explain that a little bit for the people who haven't read your piece? Yeah, so positional asphyxia is this idea that you can die of suffocation or a lack of oxygen or of a spike in CO2 without someone pressing on your windpipe or without someone physically sort of restricting your airways. If your diaphragm is restricted in a way that you can't inhale deep enough for the air to get deep into your lungs where the sacs called the alveoli exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide, you can die of suffocation relatively quickly. And so you can't cover police issues and not be aware of positional asphyxia. So I knew about that, but I didn't know about the history. And there's a term called birking that's used to describe this process and it goes back to 19th century Scotland. These two guys were selling cadavers to medical schools for dissection. And originally they were doing by digging up graves, which is also illegal, medical schools kind of look the other way. But then they discovered that it was a lot easier to just kill people and sell them the bodies. And the way they did it is they wait for the bars to close and wait for drunk people to come stumbling out and they would tackle them and then one would sit on the victim's back while the other person sort of put their hand over their mouth. And within a few minutes, the person couldn't breathe. When the hand's over your mouth, you can still suck in air, but if you have that combined with the pressure on your back, you can't inhale deep enough to actually get oxygen into your system. And so this term called birking has become kind of shorthand for this type of positional asphyxia. And by the way, I mean, positional asphyxia is not controversial outside of a police custody context. Kids have died of positional asphyxia in car seats. People in accidents or falls, if you fall in a way that your diaphragm is restricted and you can't dislodge yourself from that position, it's not an uncommon way to die. What's happened in police custody issues, and this is one of the things that really, I think columns like Coleman's can be destructive, is that there's been this concerted effort on the part of law enforcement groups in particular acts on the company that makes taser to kind of wave away positional asphyxia as a possible cause of death for in custody deaths. And instead, excuse me, they promoted this condition called excited delirium, which has no real basis in science. And it's been long distributed. It's never been endorsed by the American Medical Association or the World Health Organization. But there's this concerted effort from this network of researchers paid by acts on to excuse in custody deaths by positional asphyxia as excited delirium. And excited delirium is this really broad condition that includes dozens of symptoms that you can sort of just pick and choose from. And it's become really destructive. And it's not just that it excuses officers like Chauvin after the fact. It's sort of a preemptive way. They're trying to sort of get to the point where police don't even have to guard against these deaths. They don't have to move people into the recovery position because these people argue that positional asphyxia isn't a thing, that it isn't a way that people die in police custody. And so it's basically a recipe for more deaths, more deaths that could have been prevented. And that's where I think this documentary is particularly dangerous because it advances this idea. And I mean, look, I know I'm rambling here, but if you look at, for example, the excited delirium training that MPD gave its officers, it includes a photo of the Incredible Hulk, right? Because excited delirium, two of the symptoms are superhuman strength and imperviousness to pain. Now, that is an invitation for police to use more and more excessive force. I don't know what is. Now, they also taught that suspects should be rolled over onto their side. And they also do teach positional asphyxia. But when you have these two competing theories of excited delirium and positional asphyxia, and police can sort of choose from one, and one's clearly legitimate and one isn't, I think it's dangerous to spread the idea that positional asphyxia is not a common way for people to die in police custody. Okay, I think I have one point in here. So as I've said before, it is not unreasonable to think that Floyd died of positional asphyxia. But it's also not unreasonable, and I want, I'd like to get a really direct response about this, to think that he died of Baker's full explanation. So, yes, the top-line cause, Baker says, you know, law enforcement, subdual, so on, and necker strain, and so forth. And when asked to expand on what that meant multiple times in his testimony, he said that the, he believes the arrest led to an adrenaline surge, right? The arrest and the struggle led to an adrenaline surge, which taxed Floyd's cardiopulmonary system and led him to expire. The adrenaline was the sense in which the law enforcement subdual caused as a, and he used the analogy of, you know, taking heart medication and being allergic to it. So it caused in that sense, in the sense that it wouldn't cause in a normal person the death. So this is an explanation. This is another reasonable explanation that does not include the physical, the level of physical pressure being applied by Chauvin. Except when Baker was specifically asked about positional asphyxia, he said that he would defer to pulmonologists on that matter, that he wasn't qualified to make that diagnosis, which, you know, I think is a very humble and good thing for a medical examiner to admit. And this is one of the things I point out is that this, you know, I think Coleman and other people are right in that Chauvin was treated differently than most police officers are in these cases. But he was treated differently in the sense that they did bring in pulmonologists. They did bring in experts beyond the medical examiner. They consulted with people because they, there was a lot of public pressure to get to the truth in this case. Okay, but was there, was there, what's relevant, what's relevant when the bar is raised to reasonable doubt is, is there another reasonable explanation? Okay. And was there evidence, persuasive evidence presented at trial that ruled out as a reasonable explanation, the idea that the arrest and the struggle caused an adrenaline surge, which killed Floyd. I don't think there was. Well, one, yes, one medical examiner mentioned the adrenaline surge. He also did not rule out positional asphyxia and other witnesses said, again, that's not the standard in a criminal trial. In a criminal trial, when you have multiple reasonable explanations and you've concluded that they're all reasonable, you have the guy, the only guy that did the autopsy saying it was the adrenaline from the struggle mixed with the underlying conditions. He did. Well, that is, that is supposed to be a set of facts, which is exculpatory on the issue of causation, which was not just but for causation, but substantial causation. Okay, so I don't think there's a, I don't think that there's a great counter argument to this point. The fact that he wasn't an expert in positional asphyxia doesn't rule out that his explanation was also reasonable and did not involve physical pressure and physical weight as a but for a cause from Chauvin. But he didn't say that was a but for a cause. What he said was that in his, but for what he found in the autopsy, but he also said he wasn't qualified to make a determination on what actually killed him, that he would defer to a pulmonologist on the issue of positional asphyxia. You're interpreting Baker's refusal to diagnose positional asphyxia as him ruling it out. No, I'm not. No, no, no. It's not for the defense to rule out positional asphyxia. That's not the defense's burden. The defense can admit positional asphyxia is reasonable. I'm saying the medical examer that you're quoting didn't rule it out. I'm talking about from the perspective of a jury, not from Baker's perspective. The jury has now received a reasonable explanation from the guy that did the explanation. No, you're saying it's a reasonable explanation. You don't think it's a reasonable explanation for an adrenaline taxed the cardio? You don't think Baker's explanation was reasonable? I mean, medical examer, well, first of all, I don't think he's saying that that is what killed Floyd. I think he's saying that that was... Well, that's his leading theory. That is his leading theory. Oh, he was explaining what he found in the initial autopsy report. Then after he looked at the videos, he determined that it was a homicide. You're taking one very... Just like you did with the training on the MRT, you're taking one point of his testimony that came during defense questioning and giving it... No, no, I'm not. Well, the jury... I'm really not. I'm trying to give it more... It didn't find it reasonable. Well, that's a circular argument. Juries can get things wrong. Of course they can. Or else I wouldn't be arguing this. All right. So it sounds like Coleman that you're not really backing down from much of what you put out there. I do want to ask one more question about that before I take this to a slightly different topic, which is the trial itself. Just given what we've discussed here, some of the issues that Radley has raised, is there anything... If you were doing this over, is there anything that you would present differently? Is there any more... If the goal of your article was to try to evaluate this from a more legalistic perspective and say like, was there reasonable doubt? The critique that I'm hearing and partly putting forward is that there wasn't a full picture for the reader to evaluate that because the positional asphyxia issue wasn't in there. The extent of the details of the MRT training that tell people to turn them over on their side in a recovery position, and it's an intermediary step towards a hobble. If you were redoing this, would you construct it any differently? Well, I would have realized that there's no way to write an op-ed length piece here that is going to include details so as to preempt the critique that you're intentionally hiding things from people. So I would have submitted to my editors that this is not going to be an op-ed length piece or anything close to it. We're going to do the 10,000 word version and we're going to include everything, including things I think are of dubious relevance so as to preempt the critique that I'm hiding this from the reader. But this is... Hold on. This is a 2,000 word piece. Was it not? Yeah. I mean, when I think of op-ed length, I think of 750 words or maybe 1,000 words. It became 2,000 because I couldn't do it in op-ed length but in general, it was meant to be shorter. That was the end result. But this is a little bit of a cop-out, right? Do you have... That's not an answer to the actual question, right? Radley wrote 30,000 words about this which is the length of... Radley's word count is way too long. If I were a senator, I would be annoyed. That's the level of detail that Radley feels is warranted about this issue and certainly the response I'll write to Radley will be much longer as well. Well, Radley could have cut a solid 500 words of snark, right? There are things that are left out of Radley's piece that I find egregious. We can talk about as well. But all of this is side-stepping the actual thing which is that this is an opportunity albeit a venue that you might not want to do it in but this is an opportunity to say whether there's anything substantive you wished you had gotten... You wish you had communicated differently or anything that Radley, with his vast experience reporting on this beat, convinced you of. Is there anything... Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. So that was your first question and I felt I had to respond to Radley's other points so I actually never got around to it. So I think Radley's most useful contribution and the most useful thing that came out of this exchange for me was understanding why the MPD manual appeared to contradict itself about the hobble. That's why I omitted the hobble from my piece in the beginning is because as I was researching it many points in the manual seem to imply that the hobble was the whole endpoint of MRT but on the other hand there were these two pesky clauses one and one A which appeared to suggest the exact opposite. I didn't know what to make of it. I talked to other people who paid attention to it. They all had theories but no facts and furthermore I know, you know, BALCO, Radley, you expressed your theory of this contradiction in part one where you essentially say there's an obvious reason for the omission which is that the manual doesn't authorize MRT for any other purpose and to administer the hobble and I consider that as I was writing the piece the problem for me was that it explained the if then clause but it actually didn't explain the clause which still said that depending on the type of restraint you'll place them into the following recovering positions. If you speak English tell me exactly what you're talking about just so we can follow along but viewers can follow along. Is this what we're talking about? If you look at clause one you see it... Actually, can you go up? Is this where it starts? This is where it starts. This is B... Yeah, this is fine. Prior to this there are many clauses as you know that strongly imply that the whole point of the MRT is to get to the hobble but then there's this section as soon as reasonably possible any person restrained using MRT who's in a prone position shall be placed in the following positions plural based on the type of restraint used. Now that sentence only makes sense in the context of multiple types of restraints. Sorry, and 1A says if the hobble restraint is used the person shall be placed in the side recovery position and it seems like there should be a 1B but there isn't, right? And so I read this and it just is a contradiction and it didn't make sense to me and Radley, your theory of the contradiction as expressed in part one was that they just considered it obvious that the hobble was the only restraint device so when they say if the hobble restraint device is used they're not implying there's some other device they're just saying if it's used in MRT and then do the following thing and I had considered that but the problem is it still didn't make sense of the previous clause which still only made sense in the context of multiple restraint devices. Furthermore I knew from Johnny Mercele's testimony that there were whole techniques that were just unlisted in the manual like the ground control the ground defense program and all of these other things that are just nowhere in the manual so there's no possibility of just unknown unknowns i.e. authorized techniques that are nowhere in the manual for a person like me to find so I just said I don't understand this and rather than write something untrue about the role of the hobble in MRT I'm just going to omit it and now we know that all of these theories were wrong including Radley's offered in part one it turns out because of this guy Matt Wiener we now know that it was just a typo from a holdover of a previous version that did have multiple restraints in other words the language it's not that the writers of those clauses considered it obvious that the hobble was the only authorized restraint it's that they considered the opposite obvious that's a little bit of a fake assessment right it's like I was wrong but also so was my credit right like no no no but Coleman let me just in detail that's very important I think is that you know you're saying that there's other restraints that could be applied but no there's nothing that implies that just indefinitely holding someone in this position without you know monitoring them getting them into the safety because recovery position and applying some sort of restraint shifting topics right now I can deal with that in a moment I just want to land the point here the reason I omitted the hobble was not to pull the wool over the eyes of my readers it's because the manual contained a direct contradiction about the hobble and I didn't know what to make of it and there were only theories and no facts to support them until after Radley's part why I mean Radley you chose the route of kind of confidently putting forth your version of why there was a and you are just so slippery so no it's not slippery the one thing that the bad faith here is incredible is the same where I was wrong and I arrogantly put forth a theory that was wrong I didn't say arrogantly the whole point was that you cannot you cannot conclude from the manual that because there isn't a sub point B that that means you can kneel on someone I didn't conclude that no where did I say that no but that was my point my point was not to speculate about the broader point was that the documentary people went on Glenn Lowry show Colin and show and said that the fact that there wasn't a point B meant that because Chauvin didn't use a hobble he could use the MRT for as long as he wanted that that's how it was interpreted that's what I was responding to I mean my point is that you and me none of us knew why the manual contradicted itself until after we wrote about this I chose to omit the topic what I should have done what would have been better than what both of us did is to simply acknowledge the puzzle and say we don't know why but you also didn't even link to the manual you didn't let your readers read for themselves I know you don't believe you don't believe my explanation for why I didn't do this why I didn't link to the manual but I've already told you why I didn't why didn't you? because I didn't know that you could and I don't care if you do I literally didn't know that you could link to a G drive and insert it there without exposing the underlying email address and I'm paranoid about was it also publicly available though? I only had it in PDF form I found it was it was difficult to find a link to I had it in PDF form it was like second or third in a Google search okay I do feel that we've reached an impasse in terms of evaluating Coleman's article I did want to ask Radley and Coleman if you want to weigh in on like what you think of the aftermath of George Floyd's death particularly its effect on policing and to kind of tee that up I want to play an excerpt from the documentary where they have a series of police officers sort of complaining that this is going to demoralize them and make their job harder so let's play that clip real quick and I'd like to get Radley's reaction first and then have Coleman weigh in. The last call I was ever on was should have been a routine call it was a simple hit and run an officer just dispatched to a hit and run call and it didn't take too long before we realized this guy was completely high on drugs he was huge too he was probably six five I mean he was tall way bigger than me probably twice my size and he's like I'm not going to jail and I'm like okay well we got our body cameras on we got four guys and I'm thinking well this guy's drugged out and he's like well I'm not going to jail I'm going home pretty soon the fight's on and we're fighting with this guy I'm not striking him or anything but we're going to go to the ground and I'm thinking to myself dude if this guy OD's if this guy dies in our custody four white cops at 17th and Chicago 20 blocks from George Floyd we're going to prison and I'm looking at these guys and I go we're going to fucking prison and I was like I don't know if I can do this anymore. Radley will Derek Chauvin's conviction improve policing in America has it done so or is it going to scare police from doing their jobs as this officer implies or is the effect going to be negligible. I mean I think in the grand scheme of things it's going to be negligible I think Floyd's death and the resulting protest did move the needle on a number of these issues and it made people more sympathetic to the idea of holding officers more accountable. We did see real substantive reforms after the summer 2020 including cities and a couple of states banning no-knock raids, banning chokeholds we saw some movement toward police accountability but as I talk about in the third part of the piece I mean a lot of the real substantive reforms we saw were behind the scene so for example California the legislature passed a prohibition on excited delirium as a cause of death we saw the last two medical groups that still endorsed excited delirium revoked that endorsement the national association of medical examiners and the emergency physicians group I can't think of the proper name but you know I also think that there's been a backlash I mean a lot of legislatures particularly in red states have passed laws restricting the ability restricting protest removing criminal and civil liability for people who hit protesters with their cars we've seen in here in Tennessee for example in Nashville we passed overwhelmingly passed a civilian review board for the police department the legislature then passed the bill basically overruling that we've seen that in a lot of states where conservative state legislatures have made it basically sort of roll back reforms passed by cities as far as you know the ability to do their jobs I mean look I think there is something to the so-called effect which is the s-idea that after big protests police are more reluctant to sort of proactively police in some cases I think that's a good thing in other cases it can have detrimental effects I think it's not particularly a particularly flattering portrayal of police that if they're criticized and if they're held accountable for abuse of force that they're going to stop doing their jobs and they're going to allow sort of crime to take over cities or in neighborhoods you know as for the particular documentary you know it's designed to make us feel a lot of sympathy and empathy for MPD officers and look I know during the protests police officers took a lot of abuse including I'm sure a lot of officers who didn't deserve it and didn't have a long disciplinary record but what we did see in the DOJ report is that Minneapolis like a lot of cities that have seen protests Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore Ferguson there is a long well documented history of abuse of corruption of not just sort of abuse of force but also a complete inability to hold the worst actors accountable in these systems I mean that DOJ report on Minneapolis was damning and so you know when you read that you know you can see where some of that anger came from and of course the DOJ report the documentary doesn't you know address or try to justify what that report found because there is no justification for it that doesn't mean that you know abuse of particular police officers is or any police officer that matter is justified but it does mean that there is a real sort of tangible source of the anger that we saw during these protests and this is a mistake I think we often see from people who defend law enforcement and people sort of vaguely the political right is this effort to kind of flatten these protests into the incident that precipitated them you often see this with Ferguson when people point out that you know hands up don't shoot was a myth and it was a lie that that isn't actually what happened between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson and you know in some sense they're right I mean that that encounter did not happen the way it was portrayed and I think Darren Wilson was probably from the evidence that we've seen was unjustly accused and he deserved to be vindicated but that isn't really what the protests were about in Ferguson they were about these tiny cities that were imposing basically treating people like walking ATMs they were about cities that had you know five, six, seven times the number of arrest warrants for people as they did citizens residents because these places operated on fines and fees these little towns and so people were there was just this constant confrontation between police and citizens that led to you know generational poverty generational mistrust and that is what people that's what people were angry about and I think when we reduce these incidents these protests to just the incident that caused them you know it doesn't disservice to the people who you know have been suffering from these policies it also just doesn't solve any problems going forward and so that you know in this case I think people are wrong about George Floyd died but I also there's been this effort to say it was all based on a lie I mean when Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter did a podcast episode about this and the title of that podcast when they interviewed the makers of the documentary was the lie that changed America now they both sent back down on that and Lowry I thought had a very sort of bumble and admirable apology and said that he had been duped by the documentary but you know I think it's dangerous to reduce the anger that we see at these protests I mean people don't protest because they're mad about one particular death they're mad they protest because that particular death resonates with them right it resonates with something that they experienced that people they're friends of family experienced and so I think we need to take these protests at their whole and look at the resulting reports and journalism investigations that came out and address sort of core issues and not just a particular incident that kicked it all off Coleman I know from reading your book the end of race politics in America that you had a fairly negative reaction to what transpired after the death of George Floyd and I think you raised a lot of valid points in that book which I recommend but could you just give us your take on what transpired after this incident in America I agree with Radley that the reaction to these events is not limited to what happens between one cop and one arrestee but comes on the heels of decades of abuses humiliations large and small and the accumulated anger that that forms between communities and the people who are supposed to protect them at the same time there is it's a massive understatement to say that there is some truth to the Ferguson effect and what is tragically left out of this conversation is the aftermath of what happens to these communities which are generally disproportionately black and poor when the media runs with the racism narrative which can lead to riots which can lead to de-policing policies that while having definitely some benefits also can quite often have the effect of increasing crime I went to Ferguson in 2019 and there were still businesses mom and pop shops some black owned that had not returned as a result of the rioting there five years prior abandoned buildings and so forth 2020 represented the single greatest year over year increase in the homicide rate in over 100 years possibly ever according to Pew concentrated in the black community it is hard for me to understand what is on the opposite side of that ledger as a consequentialist that could be worth that great a loss of life and and the fact that that is left out of the conversation is galling to me and I think that it's the part of the conversation that does not get emphasized nearly enough at the height of 2020 Gallup polled black Americans and asked a simple question do you want more police less police are the same in your neighborhood now if you were listening to the rhetoric in the media you would have thought probably most black people want less police in fact it was only 20% 60% wanted the same police presence and 20% wanted more and so what was what disturbed me was the extent to which that 20% was hijacked and being portrayed as the central thrust of the black community when in fact 80% wanted the same or more police presence now obviously everyone wants better police and that's where I fully agree with Radley that these moments can be opportunities for reforms of policies that ought to be reformed but it seems in the past 10 years we have almost without exception verged into a kind of anti-police de-policing defunding of police downsizing of police which has harmed no one more than it has harmed black Americans I mean I several responses to that he's right about the poll of the substantial majority of black people want more police there are also polls showing that majority of black people have had bad interactions with police that I think it was 35 or 40% had an interaction in which they feared for their life it's true that people want more security they want to feel safe in their neighborhoods and police, more police is really the only option that they're given I think we can shrink the police pretty dramatically in ways that have been beneficial so for example the Kahootz program in Eugene that started in Eugene, Oregon that's since spread to cities across the country has been overwhelmingly successful and this is where instead of sending police when someone's in a mental health crisis which to me has always just seemed really absurd when somebody's, you know, borderline suicidal or having some sort of crisis and the first thing you do is send you know a heavily armed police team but instead sending mental health professionals and what they found is not only did they this has been overwhelmingly successful in talking these people down they rarely need to call for police backup so we're de-escalating these situations I think we can remove you know police from routine traffic enforcement to cut out some of the most sort of loaded interactions that police have with residents particularly in marginalized communities which are these traffic stops where police are trained to consider every traffic stop a potential threat and you know people in minority communities are taught to be very wary of police in these situations so I think there are lots of ways we can shrink the police footprint I'm not an abolitionist I do think that abolitionists have done a lot of the work in some of these areas and I think we should take their ideas seriously but there also hasn't been an abolition there hasn't been a defunding I mean there are, last I checked I think there are about a half dozen cities that even decreased funding by very very small margins the vast majority of the country police funding has increased pretty substantially over the last well since George Floyd but also before and I mean I did see this from a survey that shows that and we know in Minneapolis excuse me that there was an exodus after George Floyd and people have left law enforcement but there has been more funding it's just harder to recruit people yeah issues with incoming cadet classes like isn't there a huge problem with recruitment and then also sometimes when budgets are slashed that's sort of one of the first things to go that was my mistake the emergency budgets have actually been slashed I mean there has been not totally slashed but maybe marginally cut and then it's the recruitment efforts and the training of new officers that is the thing that is frequently first to go cut the rate of the increase again part of that is downstream of what I'm criticizing namely when you have a culture where like literally every fourth person has all cops or bastards in their tinder bile I don't think as many young people are going to want to become cops and then that leads to a recruitment issue and it may even mean it may even mean worse cops because fewer less of the cream of the crop want to become cops this is all about BuzzFeed study that came out a couple of years ago that found about one in five police officer social media profiles included language that was either racist or glorified violence or was dismissive I really don't trust BuzzFeed to tell me what racist language is frankly do you think there's a problem of racism in police culture I'm sure there are racist cops absolutely and there's the black community or the Latino community from wanting to become cops not from wanting to join that culture I don't know a lot of black people in NYPD is majority people of color I've interviewed a lot of black cops who tell me that there is systemic racism that's true but I don't know that that would necessarily dissuade a black person from becoming a cop I don't know if that would enter the calculus there's two different issues there's two different issues that I want to make sure that we're not muddling here and that we sort of tease out and I believe there's not necessarily attention between the two and it almost feels like in this conversation we're presenting it as if there is reasons cover story from October 2020 right after the death of George Floyd it was entirely about different possible reforms we could make to police departments not abolition of the police but rather ending the use of qualified immunity ensuring that there's transparency with body cam footage and making sure that they're released stopping over policing there was a really interesting piece by Sally Satel along the same lines as what Radley was just talking about which was all about rethinking crisis response there's a gazillion different reforms that can be made I think people of all political stripes can and should support to make sure that the cops that we do have we can argue all day over how many we have but to ensure that they're actually being held accountable and not given this total blank check and this total license to abuse their power which is something that I as a believer in rule of law and limited government would never want right like I want my communities to be safe and one way of making sure that happens is to ensure that government actors are not just given extreme license to abuse the people they're interacting with I think that that can be true while at the same time we can critique the activist and mainstream media narratives following George Floyd which was that these protests were mostly peaceful when in fact they were highly destructive riots in some places and that we totally oppose the destruction of private property and that should be something that we do not in any way tolerate and that that is sort of where your free speech rights end I mean there's certainly I think it's totally fair to say we ought to expect better of our police officers and of our policing practices but also the ACAB movement is stupid and full of completely counterproductive ideas I don't think really citing people saying, unthinkingly saying ACAB and their Tinder bios is particularly germane to what we're talking about here both of these things can be true at once which is that we can entirely critique these activist approaches and beliefs and critique the mainstream media narrative while also expecting better and talking about serious reforms that police departments ought to implement right like these two things that you were saying that Radley's advocating for and that Coleman's advocating for are as I see it not intention but they are made more difficult the more we sort of allow kind of shoddy journalistic narratives like those offered in the fall of Minneapolis to take hold we definitely need to find the places and focus on the places where they're not intention where we can have our cake and eat it too where we can take techniques off the menu for police to use increase accountability without increasing crime we need to find those places and universalize all of those things in other areas there are actual policy tradeoffs I believe that sometimes there are just policy tradeoffs right there are two good things and I would argue I would argue the policy tradeoffs of defunding you know general culture of hostility towards police which discourages recruits discourages morale all of that what that if that leads to the the greatest year over surge in homicide in over a hundred years I would argue we've we've urged too far on one side of that tradeoff and if not that I'm not I fear that that's really sloppy if you're talking about are you talking about 2020 yes yes yes I mean what other things did we have going on in 2020 right like we had walkdowns we had a pandemic we had the experience of people from it didn't happen in any other country the pandemic was worldwide we also had more violence generally in the US than any other country that doesn't explain the trend but we also saw an increase in drug addiction which is also a down stream of the same cause blood pressure we saw an increase in mental illness that's a despair right suicidality I mean there was an increase in the country all around the world there was a global pandemic in one country there was the greatest homicide spike it's ever experienced it also happened to be the country that had a racial reckoning directed against police not a coincidence that's all I'm saying I am not familiar enough with the crime statistics of every single other country to be able to ascertain with any certainty the only thing that I try to keep tabs on is crime rates in the United States and even that is very hard to do because there are many different categories but I do think that this is an incredibly sloppy thing to do I mean one other thing that we could very easily point to if we're trying to actually suss out causality here is the specific pandemic policy and the lockdowns instituted in the United States versus in many other places I feel like when you begin to broaden the scope like this and try to do this comparative analysis we end up getting even sloppier than we already are in fact being because it is impossible to hold the crime rates of what was Germany's crime rate like no you don't know for certain that the spike in the United States was by far the worst in 2020 when compared with literally every other country that year all of our peer countries yeah all of that are normal comparison countries literally I mean I think we all did agree or there was a concession that the Ferguson effect that is a measurable thing that happens after these events so well I think it's partly because of deep policing but it's also because these events also inspire a lot of mistrust between marginalized communities and the police and so people are less likely to cooperate with the police which I would say I would argue that given what we saw we've seen in some of these DOJ reports that's entirely understandable maybe even justified in some cases but I think what Coleman's reaction is on the accountability issues is going to be a continuing problem which is that I think a lot of people including seemingly Coleman but a lot of his colleagues particularly the Manhattan Institute I haven't been there in years sorry for the record I haven't worked there in years go ahead former colleagues then see accountability as part of the problem the more you know demoralized they get the harder it is to recruit police officers and you know I think that's a problem when we have a profession that requires as much trust as policing does and that has the kind of power that policing does that measures of accountability are seen as an attack on the profession itself that you know that I think is a big problem I mean we've seen some of the red the conservative legislators have seen a body camera footage not available to the public that only the police department could decide when they determine it and part of that justification for that is this argument that if we let you know just anybody look at these body camera videos then police are going to be unjustly accused and be dragged to the mud and you know there have been some examples of that certainly but I think the when you're talking about people with the power to kill to use lethal force I think we need to be airing on the side of accountability I just really once again keep going back to this idea because I mean I'm a frequent critic of you know NYPD's practices but also specifically of the amount of crime and public disorder that we have deliberately as a policy choice allowed to fester on the streets of New York where I live and where I'm raising a child right and so this is not something that I am glib or dismissive of right like I want perhaps more than other people or perhaps just the same as my neighbors I want NYPD to do their jobs and I want the streets that I walk to be safe but I do struggle with this idea that you know that spikes in crime that there's something about bringing police to accountability and implementing these reforms would somehow you know lead to crime spikes and my subway system for example being made less safe right like to me that doesn't it's not clear to me that that is or should be the trade off well if whether it should be the trade off would be relevant to whether it is but to some extent and in some ways yeah and as I said I don't want to repeat my answer but I think we have to zero in on the ways in which it isn't a trade off I don't think body cams are a trade off at all I think every officer should wear a body cam all the time and it will only ever throw more light on the interaction for example the question is where that footage goes right I think it should all be made public immediately yeah yeah well and in the case of George Floyd that body cam footage was delayed and possibly yeah would have people might have interpreted things differently if some of it had come out earlier but you know I probably would have interpreted it more favorably to the cops relative to the very possibly very possibly but I do want to ask Bradley this question that you know because I think this is where I find Coleman to be on pretty firm ground when he's critiquing aspects of the criminal justice movement the sort of anti-police or even kind of reading racial bias into things when it's not there is that something that is contributing to is that something that's preventing the kind of reforms we want to see that is muddling the conversation because like I was looking at you know this is data that's really hard to find but the best I could find was Peter Moscow's compilation of officer involved shootings and when you look back you know historically back into the 1970s you see that the rates of police violence have gone down over time in the same way that if we take the long view of crime I think people who are worried about crime need to cope with the fact that if you go back to the 80s and 90s yeah we've seen we saw a crime spike in 2020 but historically thank god we're nowhere near as violent as it used to be but it seems like that should be part of the conversation around police violence too always putting these things in context do you have any critiques or worries about the way that police violence is framed by the criminal justice movement well I mean look I think those two things go hand in hand right there are fewer police shootings because there's less crime in general I mean you know I also think that for a very very long time particularly before the advent of cell phone cameras we had no idea how common police abuse was because we always took the officer's word and you know it would take four or five six witnesses to contradict a police officer before you know we would give a victim any sort of credence it was cell phone that really showed that police abuse was much more common than those of us who aren't a typical victim would have believed you know are there excesses in the criminal justice reform movement and the activist movement I mean are there methods and tactics used that I wouldn't use sure I guess but I'm also these communities have been ignored for a very very long time a lot of their concerns have been validated in these DOJ reports I don't really see it as my position to tell people how to draw attention to these issues and to tell them how to be activists to try to change things to try to reform things but they were rioting in the streets destroying property does that not seem like something that ought to be of course I'm opposed to rioting and destroying property I also think I mean you made a comment earlier about being peaceful I mean there was a Princeton study of the protest after George Floyd that found 91% of them had no violence at all and of the 9% that did a lot of that was initiated by police but surely you understand that what I was saying was a gesture at the internet meme right the great Kyra I know but I think I find that meme a little frustrating because they were overwhelmingly peaceful can I agree with Bradley on this by the way I went to a lot of protests over 90% of the people there would never be involved in any kind of violence probably probably 99 it was a fringe and it devolved every night so I actually agree with the spirit of what Bradley's but the meme arose not out of attempting to tar all of the protesters as violent people but rather out of the absurdity of the media reporting on it I have to go but I want to can I ask you guys one more question before I go so you all I don't mean to cut you off you all seem to be forgive me if I'm painting with a broad brush but civil liberties adjacent people right so there's so many aspects of Chauvin's trial that you would think would tug at the heartstrings of civil liberties people there's murder which prosecutors love but defense lawyers hate criminal law professors hate progressives hate with very good reason because it has strict liability without having to prove intent and in particular when you can have assault be the underlying charge of felony murder it sneaks double jeopardy and through the back door because assault and murder are kind of the same thing but you can make someone liable for murder based on an assault you know prosecutors love this you have in the case of Chauvin you have jury bias issues you have one of the jurors was found with get your get your knee off our next shirt before the trial you have jurors complaining fearing for their safety in the event of an acquittal you have the jury not sequestered in one of the most publicized cases in recent American history you have rulings of evidence you know about you know not not showing the MRT training slide even though there was lots of other evidence at the trial about what was generally taught without it having to be specifically seen by Chauvin so why isn't there more concern about I would have expected to get more agreement about the elements of Chauvin's trial that seemed unfair than I do I mean pretty much everything you've mentioned is our common problems within the criminal justice system I think Chauvin got a much fairer trial than a lot of people do Minnesota's felony murder law is unique to Minnesota in other states felony murder allows you to charge with first degree murder in Minnesota it's how you get to this involuntary murder charge so it's a substantial sentence but it was not the first degree type murder charge you know as far as juror bias I mean I've written about the fact that there are police officers that serve on jurors in some parts of the country you know it is a problem to assume that jurors can put their biases aside I mean death-qualified juries I think is one of the most outrageous aspects of our criminal justice system where in a capital punishment case you the any juror who says they're opposed to capital punishment on principle is removed from the jury as a matter of fact the prosecution doesn't even have to use one of their their exceptions and what that does is not only it selects for you know a jury that is definitely you know okay with capital punishment but it eliminates people who are suspect of the criminal justice system in general right because that's one reason to be against the death penalties because you don't think the system can administer it fairly so yeah I mean these are all concerns I mean I'm very concerned that Chauvin was stabbed in prison I think it's a testament to the inadequacy of our prison system that they were unable to protect him but these are all common problems throughout the criminal justice system and you know I think that Chauvin should be treated you know I think if every defendant and prisoner or maybe not prisoner of every defendant were given the trial that Chauvin was given we would have a much fairer system it would still be a flawed system but what's not common is juries fearing for their safety in the event of an acquittal because it's a almost OJ level celebrity not celebrity are you suggesting this should have been moved to a different venue well I mean it would it would seem that would that would be very logical to move it to a different venue I mean I think there are you know yeah if not if not this trial then then what you know what would be the bar for moving to another trial moving to another place if not something like that well I would have to look and see what the jurors explicitly said you have people protesting as far afield as New Zealand over this are jurors on record just saying that they were afraid for their lives yes there was a quote in my piece that you critique I quote an unseated juror and a seated juror fearing for their safety in the event of an acquittal okay well I mean that's obviously a concern I don't know how you have a trial that you know is high stakes is this one I mean there are lots of concerns with with with juror bias and how we eliminate that to the extent that we can I don't think that yes that particular extent we can but in in Chauvin's case I'm not sure we could I'm not sure there's any way he could have got a fair trial so what do you do to prosecute him then no I'm not I'm not saying that I'm saying I'm not sure there was there's a way that he could have gotten a fair trial given the given the tenor and every judgment call that would have made it somewhat fairer was was was ruled against him well I think the exaggeration I mean not not every but but some pretty major ones well removing I mean the slide we've we've discussed in detail I don't think I mean his lawyers failed to establish a foundation to not well the significance of the slide wasn't that wasn't because of who saw it is because of who made it namely the Minneapolis police department but that wasn't the argument that was originally made it was that he was trained on it and they couldn't establish that right but but I understand that's but the reason it was relevant from the point of view of a jury would be that the Minneapolis police department made this slide now there's much other testimony including the guy Ker Yang where he was just talking about what is generally trained right not with no burden to show that Chauvin specifically had had trained in and you would think a jury would really may be prejudiced by not seeing that slide but as we discussed the slide does not necessarily exonerate him given Chauvin's weight on look if you talk I think I'm on firm ground here saying civil liberties people criminal criminal law people generally believe when someone is on trial for murder that a lot of judgment calls about rules of evidence they should really get the chance to make as full of defense as is allowable given the standards and rules of evidence and there are many judgment calls here that went in the other direction well yeah but there were also judgment calls that went in his favor for example removing prosecutors from the case because they met with the medical examiner without defense attorney's presence which I can tell you is never something a judge sanctions the state for and in this case a judge sanctioned the prosecutors for having that with the medical examiner yes but not showing the photo that looks extremely similar to the photo of what he's doing is a fairly huge one but just to wrap this up I'll just say I agree that there's probably some critiques of any trial that can be made I don't know that it's enough to overturn the outcome in this case but it's always legitimate to raise issues of fairness for a trial I know you have to go Coleman so I would just want to leave each of you kind of one last word if there's any you know final thoughts or call to action or reflections on the conversation you want to offer before you go Coleman you can go first it's you gotta you gotta run I want to encourage I want to think Bradley I want to encourage people to read my piece and just as an exercise consider reading it as if I'm thinking from the perspective of reasonable doubt and I'm not an evil genius trying to hide a set of facts from you Bradley I don't think that Coleman he wrote a piece that he got a lot wrong I think wrote a piece that got a lot wrong and that is misleading and is misleading in particularly destructive ways and I pretty disappointed that you know I feel like a lot of people who sort of came would come to this from an ideological viewpoint that doesn't necessarily favor either of us have said that you know that they found to be misleading on a lot of these points fact that you can't acknowledge anything is pretty disappointing in particular you know the free press which has positioned itself as sort of kind of an arbitrator of skepticism and you know debunker of sort of false narratives I think this piece promotes a false narrative the one that was put forward in the documentary and I was hoping for at least a little bit of contrition we didn't get it today I think that regardless of you know that somewhat unsatisfying or dissatisfying conclusion it does definitely leave me feeling somewhat optimistic that both of you guys were willing to sit down and have this conversation with us and I think engage in at times a sneering but mostly extremely respectful and you know really substantive conversation so Raleigh Bowclown Coleman Hughes thank you guys both so much I hope people follow all of your work and read all the different components of this that way they can attempt to come to their own conclusions thank you