Below is a common error. Here are the facts: Dr. Andrew Baker, the Chief Medical Examiner for Hennepin County (who was the only person that conducted the autopsy of George Floyd) did not agree with the prosecution’s evolving theories of the cause of Floyd’s death. He did not find that Floyd died from a vascular restraint (blood choke), which was the prosecution’s theory at the beginning of trial. And he did not agree that Floyd died of positional asphyxia, which became the prosecution’s fall back theory when, in the middle of trial and to prosecutors’ utter surprise, their blood choke theory imploded in real time (due to it being physiologically impossible to kill somebody by compressing only one of their carotid arteries). Baker’s autopsy provided zero evidentiary support for everything the prosecutors wanted the jury to believe. But it’s worse than that. Baker also found a lack of evidence where one would expect to find evidence had the prosecution’s theories been correct. Baker called this absence of evidence the “pertinent negatives,” and they all - ALL - worked against the prosecution.

Floyd had norfentanyl in his blood (the metabolite of fentanyl) because his first ingestion of fentanyl is not the one that contributed to his death. He lived long enough to metabolize that first ingestion. But then, as officers Lane and Keung approached his vehicle, Floyd shoved speedballs in his mouth (to hide them, probably). They began to dissolve as he was walked to squad 320. He began actively fighting just as the meth was kicking in a few minutes later he spit the speedballs out of his mouth into the back of squad 320, but not before a second dose of fentanyl made its way into his bloodstream. Almost exactly five minutes later, he was dead —- corresponding precisely to the timing of anticipated peak respiratory depression. There’s a lot more here, but all of it is consistent with the same conclusion: the second dose of fentanyl played a material role in Floyd’s death, together with other factors. But none of them had anything to do with Chauvin.