Coleman Hughes vs. Radley Balko: Who's Right About George Floyd?

Writer and podcast host Coleman Hughes published a column in The Free Press in January entitled, "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 on YouTube and Rumble. The documentary makes the case that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin may have been wrongly convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020. In his column, Hughes ultimately concluded that it's time for Americans to "consider the possibility that Chauvin was not a murderer, but a scapegoat."

Later in January, investigative journalist and former Reason staffer Radley Balko began publishing an extensive three-part rebuttal on his Substack The Watch, which he concluded earlier this month. It's entitled "The Retconning of George Floyd," and he takes apart errors and what he says are outright lies in the documentary. He also heavily criticizes Hughes and The Free Press for failing to consult experts or include research that he says could've helped them avoid serious mistakes.

Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe hosted Hughes and Balko on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions. Balko argued that Hughes and The Free Press missed or misrepresented key facts about the killing of Floyd and Chauvin's trial. Hughes defended his skepticism of the felony murder verdict. They also discussed their opposing views of the protests and police reforms that followed Floyd's death.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

1. "What Really Happened to George Floyd?" The Free Press
2. "The Retconning of George Floyd," The Watch
3. Minneapolis PD Use of Force Policies, The Law of Self Defense 
4. Autopsy of George Floyd
5. Minnesota Felony Murder in the Second Degree, Sec. 609.19 MN Statutes 
6. Police Executive Research Forum staffing
7. National violent crime rates, 2012–2022
8. 50 years of officer-involved shooting data, Peter Moskos
9. Department of Justice report on Minneapolis Police Department post–Floyd killing

 

This is a rush transcript. Please check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Zach Weissmueller: Who's right about the death of George Floyd? Just 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 Weissmueller, senior producer for reason, and my co-host is Reason Associate Editor, Liz Wolef. Hey, Liz.

Liz Wolfe: Hey, Zach.

Weissmueller: Today, we're hosting a conversation between journalist Radley Balko 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. Balko disagreed strongly and began publishing an extensive three-part rebuttal on his Substack "The Watch". A 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 Balko says could have helped them avoid serious mistakes.

I'm grateful to both of them for agreeing to come on our show. I am 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. Why?

Radley Balko: 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 personally, but we have a lot of colleagues and friends in common who speak highly of him. And I had watched this documentary gain a lot of momentum on the far right and among police advocates, law enforcement advocates. And it wasn't until it started gaining momentum in right of center, libertarian, centrist circles… I know the Fifth Column Podcast talked about it in slightly skeptical, but mostly in a way of endorsing a lot of its claims, or at least giving credibility to them. And then Coleman, I think, really pushed it into the mainstream. And a lot of people who have read me for a long time started sending me Coleman's column and asking if I had a response to it. When the series went up, Coleman's response and Barry Weiss' response in The Free Press was to basically to invite me onto their podcast to discuss it.

And I agreed to do this podcast because I have history with Reason. I will say though, the response to someone pointing out factual errors and errors of omission and publishing something that's, I think, deeply misleading is not to debate and discuss those issues. It's to either issue a correction or retraction, or to explain why you don't think a retraction or correction is necessary. And so far, 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 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 establish good faith, or as a demonstration of good faith, I think I need The Free Press or Coleman to address what I think are clear errors in the column Before we go any further. So there's the maximal restraint technique problems in Coleman's column that amplify what I think are clear errors in the documentary.

There are mistakes about positional asphyxia, the idea that that 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. 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 samples was homicide and testified for the prosecution at Derek Chauvin's trial. When Coleman talks about Bob Kroll, the former union head, and his wife, Liz Collin, who is the narrator and produced the documentary, he talks about how they were intensively canceled but doesn't mention Kroll's long history of abuse and allegations of racism and abuse. I think you could very plausibly argue that that's an error of omission because Kroll was in 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.

Then finally, he talks about Floyd's health. We've had exchanges on Twitter about this. He claims he'd 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, and we can talk to addiction experts and emergency medical technicians, they'll tell you that the symptoms that Floyd was exhibiting or the way he was behaving in the video that we see are not consistent with somebody who's dying of an overdose or in the midst of an opioid overdose.

You basically become lethargic and sleepy, and you basically just kind of drift off. Floyd was animated. He was agitated. And multiple people who write about addiction have said that there's no evidence that that Floyd was in the midst of an overdose. Coleman also writes that it had fatal levels of fentanyl system, and this is a claim we've seen often from the right and from law enforcement sources. And it came out in trial that is levels of fentanyl were actually below the average level of people who were brought in for DWI charges, for driving while under the influence of opioids in non-fatal cases. So his fentanyl levels were lower than those cases. And 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 norefentanyl, which is the metabolized form was one point something, I think the average fatality, is over nine. So 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. Jacob Sullum has 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 us, but because they built up a resistance… And we know that Floyd had a lifelong drug problem. So I think these are the issues that I think need to be addressed, and I hope that Coleman and The Free Press will address them directly.

We were talking before Coleman came on here. I've been in journalism for 20 years. I've made a lot of mistakes over the course of my career, and I've found that when you acknowledge them and correct them, there's a hesitancy, I think to run corrections because people think it erodes their credibility, but I think it actually adds to your credibility when you admit to mistakes because we're all human. We all make mistakes. But so far I think the reaction, I think has been a little bit disappointing.

Wolfe: That makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate you laying out the case, Radley. You laid it out very well in the three-part series, but I also think that this is 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?

Coleman Hughes: Well, I want to first address some of the things that were said there, if you don't mind, at least in the abstract.

Maybe we can later go point by point and 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 2000 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. 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.

Wolfe: But there are two suggestions. I want to engage with this with some depth. There are two suggestions, I believe, in the text of your piece, Coleman, that do 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.

Hughes: So let me back up. OK? In a normal debate each side has a symmetric task, right? I 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 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, it's 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 through from the point of view of giving a definite version of events, right? So I say that it's not unreasonable to think that Chauvin killed him, right? 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 pre-existing conditions, drugs in his system, and adrenaline caused by the arrest, which was, when push 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's 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.

Wolfe: Radley, how do you look at that?

Balko: This is kind of the way Coleman has reacted to this entire exchange from the first post that I put up. He is literally just asking questions. 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… Let me get 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 handcuffed subjects are combative and still pose a threat to themselves," goes on and on and on. 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 NPD 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, 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, so they can't 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 pulmonologist who testified for the state, and other pulmonologists since who've reviewed the evidence that happened to Floyd. What Chauvin did to Floyd is not MRT. And Chauvin pretty 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've 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, 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 this is what the MPD trained its officers to do what Chauvin did to Floyd. They train them 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, 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. What we see in the video, Floyd is held in that position for nine minutes, including almost three minutes after he loses consciousness. That isn't taught at MPD, it isn't taught at any police department in the country, and that is where Chauvin commits the actual crime here.

Weissmueller: Yeah. Radley, I think that this is 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 is 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've 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 point by point-

Hughes: Can I respond to what Radley is saying here?

Weissmueller: 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.

Hughes: OK, 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 train technique, it's some other technique, right? 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. I actually don't know which argument Radley's making.

Weissmueller: Let's look at this.

Balko: Those things aren't contradictory at all. It is not.

Weissmueller: Let's look side by side. This is 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.

Hughes: But you would acknowledge that this is MRT, right?

Balko: No, it isn't.

Hughes: Sorry.

Balko: It isn't.

Hughes: This is not MRT because you call it the MRT training slide in your…

Balko: No. What Chauvin is doing to Floyd is not MRT.

Hughes: OK. Sorry. I'm talking about the training slide right now. The training slide is MRT or is an element of MRT. Do you agree with that, or no?

Balko: Yes. The MPD has acknowledged that that slide is part of the MRT training, correct? It also says on the slide, very 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….It's supposed to be temporary. It's not something you administer for 9 minutes.

Hughes: I understand that. But here, OK, can we zoom in on the second picture on Chauvin's?

Weissmueller: Yes.

Hughes: 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?

Weissmueller: 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.

Hughes: Yeah. OK. 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 other reasonable explanations. So as we know from the transcript, the moment they get George Floyd on the ground, Chauvin says to the partner, or "Do you have a hobble?" Tou Thao 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, Thao finds the hobble. But now that they have EMS coming, Chauvin and Tou decide that actually, we're not going to put on the hobble because it takes about 2 minutes to get on roughly.

And when you have EMS coming, hiked up to code three, you reasonably assume EMS is 3 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 20/20 hindsight, is that there was, as 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 why they didn't apply the hobble, right? Or rather, that is certainly a reasonable explanation for why they didn't apply the hobble.

Weissmueller: OK. But Coleman, let me play just a little bit of the video because that does not appear to be what happens in the video.

[Video plays]

Hughes: Anyone can look up the transcript and confirm that this is what happened. Chauvin says, "Do you have a hobble?" Tou Thao 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 Tou asks again, "Well, do you need the hobble now?" And they say, "No, we've got EMS coming." Essentially, that's-

Balko: So at what point is it OK 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 saying he can't breathe anymore? And then Chauvin continues to put weight on his back for another 3 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 to unconsciousness?

Hughes: So 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 MPD 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 scene is code four, meaning everything's safe and everything under control, the scene is safe.

Balko: It's hard to resist when you're unconscious. How does that mean the scene isn't safe?

Hughes: The code four does not merely include…a person not resisting, but also consists in a scene being secure and safe. So 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 8:26, 8:27. 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, or 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.

Balko: The key word there is reasonable. Literally, the hostility 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 any of 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 are using, then just about any amount of force is going to be reasonable. Chauvin, literally, ignored warnings from his fellow officers. He ignored warning 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.

Hughes: 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 load-and-go and delayed treatment because they perceived the scene-

Wolfe: That was 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, right? The paramedics' assessment of the situation in its wholeness and 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 be gospel here.

Hughes: Well, the paramedics' assessment, they're coming on a scene. They're seeing that there's a hostile, angry crowd-

Wolfe: After. But the crowd was seemingly, without having been there, seemingly less hostile earlier in the act before it had become so clear that Chauvin-

Hughes: Two minutes, right? We're talking about a 3-minute difference.

Wolfe: Three minutes.

Hughes: Yeah, about three minutes.

Wolfe: No, three very consequential minutes, right? The crowd was-

Hughes: The crowd was crescendoing throughout this, and they peak when around the ambulance gets there. But again-

Wolfe: The paramedics' assessment of the safety of the scene might have been different than the assessment of the safety of the scene 3 minutes prior, right?

Weissmueller: They seem to be peaking when they notice that he has gone limp. And that's one of the key questions that Radley 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?

Hughes: OK. There are four different arguments floating here [that] I think I have to address. So that one right there, again, Mercil…. It's not a matter of what you or I think looks reasonable. 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. And Mercil testified that they're trained that there are situations where you can hold someone you've just made unconscious even after they're unconscious. 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….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.

Balko: That's a common myth in policing, but that's not what they're trained on….

Hughes: The defense asked Johnny Mercil, "Have you been trained or do you train that if you're talking, you're breathing?" And he said, "Yes."

Balko: You're taking deep hypotheticals….

Hughes: No, these are not deep hypotheticals….

Balko: "We don't train neck restraints with officers in service, and as far as I know, we never have." That's a direct quote from Mercil. You're paraphrasing Mercil. When asked, "You should use the least amount of force necessary to meet your goals. You can use a lower level of force to meet your objectives at safer and better"-

Hughes: You're quoting from a different-

Balko: He specifically said that what Chauvin did to Floyd is not taught by MPD. He explicitly said that.

Hughes: Yeah, yeah, 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 Mercil's where he was asked directly-

Balko: You're quoting from a question the defense posed in the context of hypothetical deliberately to get him to say the kinds of things that you're quoting him from now when he was asked directly-

Hughes: No, 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?" He said-

Balko: When he was asked specifically about what Chauvin did to Floyd, he said over and over that it was not trained and that it was excessive force.

Hughes: Oh, and by the way, and Tou Thao also said in his BCA, I don't know if this is called the position 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 four, and that code four consists of an angry and potentially building crowd. And again, we can't judge in 20/20 hindsight, you have to understand that, you have to allow for their worry that a crowd is building, and it in fact was building.

Wolfe: 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 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, but 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?

Hughes: 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. My claims are not [inaudible 00:38:40] it's claims.

Balko: You don't cite anything other than the documentary.

Wolfe: You cite a bunch of different complaints.

Hughes: What do you mean I don't cite anything other than the documentary? How many hyperlinks are there? There are dozens.

Balko: OK, but you didn't consult with any outside experts, any specialists. It's all based on claims. You actually don't make any claims that aren't also made in the documentary.

Hughes: That's definitely not true. I definitely make claims that aren't made in the documentary, several.

Wolfe: Yeah. Well, maybe the better way to handle that is, Coleman, which forensic analysis, … which forensic pathologists, 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?

Hughes: Look, I watched the documentary. I've been paying attention to this case since 2020. The documentary provoked me writing the piece, but it was probably 5 percent of my research for the piece…in terms of my time spent. I talked to lawyers in particular, I didn't talk to forensic pathologists, which I understand Balko faults 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.

Wolfe: Did you find anything in the course of your research that cast doubt on anything that you'd seen in The Fall of Minneapolis? Was there anything that left you scratching your head being like, "Well, that is different than what they said. I totally disagree with their framing of that"?

Hughes: There were definitely witnesses that seemed… 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 doubt that there were many misleading witnesses, misleading statements. I would have to do a kind of critique of the documentary separately to parse out my disagreements, but I don't remember off the top of my head everything.

Wolfe: The other thing that I did want to ask just really fast because I do think 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 Kroll, her husband. Liz Collin, the producer, played a massive role in making this documentary, and the fact that there wasn't really disclosure of her relationship with Bob Kroll, 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.

How could you not represent that? Because at least… I'm obviously a libertarian, I'm biased to be against public sector unions, but that conflict of interest seems really relevant.

Hughes: 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 2,000-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 Kroll was for the reader to get the… Again, the thesis of my essay was that Chauvin was falsely convicted.

Wolfe: There is a paragraph about Collin and Kroll, specifically Collin, being pushed out of her job as a local news anchor and there being a public cancellation of this couple. And you literally say here-

Hughes: That's because she was the producer or director of the documentary. Had Bob Kroll been listed, I would've done something on him too.

Wolfe: To quote directly from your piece, "Both Kroll 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." OK, 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 Kroll 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.

Hughes: OK. 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 Kroll.

Wolfe: But 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….I am as anti-cancellation as many people, you know that in our sort of corner. And to me, the way that this paragraph read was that Collin and Kroll were canceled for the heresy of possibly examining a revisionist narrative about George Floyd, as opposed to the fact that Kroll, he's a political lightning rod in Minneapolis.

Hughes: So I include the fact that he was head of the police union, right?

Wolfe: Yeah.

Hughes: So does that not reveal the conflict of interest right there? You would already understand there that he's a cop, he may have a pro-cop bias.

Balko: But you say cancellation, which it 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 policy making 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 inside 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 attacked for his free speech; he was actually attacked for his record.

Hughes: Were those allegations of racism proven?

Balko: Well, 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 that there was a history of MPD of not holding officers accountable, including not even investigating allegations. But yeah, the city settled several lawsuits involving use of force against him, in which he had misused force.

Wolfe: Yeah, I'm more involved in the misuse of force allegations than the, I guess, white-power motorcycle-gang allegations. I'm more interested in the actual material harms he might have done to victims, including the settlements. But 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.

Weissmueller: I'll just say that on this question, I am more on Coleman's side. I feel like I got a sense of who Kroll was, and it wasn't as central to me as the argument he was making. But the points that you're raising about 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 you're raising these questions of like, could there have been other contributing factors to Floyd's death? Was there confusion about what he was supposed to do in that situation? But then Radley goes into great detail about this issue of positional asphyxia, which apparently is a well-known problem among police departments. He embeds a 2013 NYPD training video, which I want to play a little bit of just so our viewers can get a sense of 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 play a little bit of that video, and then I'd like to get you to respond to the idea that you left this out of the argument.

[VIDEO]

Weissmueller: 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?

Hughes: 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…or rather caused Floyd's labored breathing. 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 killed him, 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 vs. 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.

Cause of death is entirely relev