The lawyer for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of killing George Floyd, said Saturday that Mr. Chauvin’s family was kept in the dark by federal prison officials after he was stabbed in prison.
Attorney Gregory M. Erickson called out the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ lack of transparency, a day after his client was stabbed by another inmate at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, Arizona, a prison plagued by security breaches and a lack of staff.
A person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Friday that Mr. Chauvin was seriously injured by the knife. The person spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the attack.
On Saturday, Brian Evans, a spokesman for the Minnesota attorney general’s office, said, “We’ve heard he’s expected to survive.”
Erickson said Mr. Chauvin’s family and their lawyers have hit a wall trying to get information about the attack from Bureau of Prisons officials. He said the Chauvin family had been forced to assume he was in stable condition, based only on news reports, and had contacted the prison several times to ask for updates, but had not received no information.
“As an outsider, I view this lack of communication with his lawyers and family members as completely outrageous,” Erickson said in a statement to the AP. This appears to indicate a poorly managed establishment and indicates the conditions under which Derek’s attack may have occurred. »
Concerns
Erickson’s comments highlight concerns raised for years that federal prison officials provide little or no information to relatives of seriously injured or ill incarcerated people in federal custody. The AP previously reported that the Bureau of Prisons ignored its internal guidelines and failed to notify the families of inmates seriously ill with COVID-19 as the virus raged in federal prisons across the United States.
The issue of family notification also prompted the passage of federal legislation, introduced last year in the U.S. Senate, that would require the Department of Justice to establish guidelines for the Federal Bureau of Prisons and state corrections systems notify families of incarcerated people if their loved one suffers a serious condition, illness, life-threatening injury, or dies behind bars.
“The fact that family members who are responsible for Derek’s decisions regarding his personal medical care and emergency contact were not informed after his stabbing further indicates the poor procedures of the “establishment and the lack of institutional control,” insisted Mr. Erickson.
A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday evening.
The Bureau of Prisons only confirmed an assault at the Arizona facility and said employees took “life-saving measures” before the inmate was taken to a hospital for further treatment and evaluation. The Bureau of Prisons did not name the victim or provide medical status “for privacy and security reasons.”
Prosecutors who successfully secured a second-degree murder conviction against Mr. Chauvin during a 2021 jury trial expressed dismay that he became the target of violence while in federal custody.
Terrence Floyd, George Floyd’s brother, told the AP on Saturday that he wouldn’t want anyone stabbed in prison and that he felt numb when he first heard the news.
“I’m not going to devote my energy to anything that happens within these four walls – because my energy has been devoted to getting it in there,” Terrence Floyd said.
Mr. Chauvin’s stabbing is the second high-profile attack on a federal prisoner in the past five months. In July, disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar was stabbed by a fellow inmate at a federal penitentiary in Florida.
Mr. Chauvin, 47, was sent to FCI Tucson from a maximum security state prison in Minnesota in August 2022 to concurrently serve a 21-year federal sentence for violating George Floyd’s civil rights and a state sentence to 22 and a half years for second degree murder.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Mr. Chauvin’s appeal of his murder conviction. Separately, Mr. Chauvin is seeking to overturn his federal guilty plea, saying new evidence shows he did not cause Mr. Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020.
Increased surveillance
Chauvin’s stabbing comes as the Federal Bureau of Prisons has faced increased scrutiny in recent years following the prison suicide of wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. It is another example of the agency’s failure to ensure the safety of even its most high-profile prisoners after Mr. Nassar and that of the suicide of Ted Kaczynski, known by the nickname “Unabomber”, at a federal medical center in June.
At the federal prison in Tucson in November 2022, an inmate at the facility’s low-security detention camp pulled out a gun and attempted to shoot a visitor in the head. The weapon, which the inmate should not have had, misfired and no one was injured.
An ongoing AP investigation has revealed deep and previously unseen flaws within the Bureau of Prisons, the Justice Department’s largest law enforcement agency, with more than 30,000 employees, 158,000 inmates and a annual budget of approximately $8 billion.
Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters was appointed last year to reform the crisis-plagued agency. She pledged to change archaic hiring practices and bring new transparency, while emphasizing that the agency’s mission is to “make good neighbors, not good inmates.”
