On June 25, 2021, in a Hennepin County courtroom in Minneapolis, Judge Peter Cahill sentenced former police officer Derek Chauvin to 22 and a half years in prison for the murder of George Floyd. The hearing closed one of the most closely watched criminal proceedings in recent American history. State prosecutors had asked for 30 years; Chauvin's defense had asked for probation and no prison time at all. Cahill landed in between, but well above the presumptive guideline term — a sentence roughly ten years longer than what Minnesota's guidelines would ordinarily call for.
The number 22.5 carried weight precisely because cases like this so rarely reach a sentencing at all. Floyd had died thirteen months earlier, on May 25, 2020, after Chauvin pinned him to the pavement and pressed a knee into his neck for approximately nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Floyd repeated the words "I can't breathe" as bystanders filmed and pleaded with the officers to stop. The video traveled the world within days and set off a summer of protest against police violence on a scale the country had not seen in a generation.
Chauvin, a nineteen-year veteran of the Minneapolis Police Department, had been convicted two months before the sentencing. On April 20, 2021, a jury found him guilty on all three counts he faced: second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. The guilty verdict was itself treated as historic — a rare instance of a sitting or former officer being held criminally accountable for a death that occurred during an arrest. The sentencing hearing that followed was less a question of whether Chauvin would serve time than of how much.