A former Minneapolis police officer convicted in state court for his role in the killing of George Floyd was sentenced on Monday to four years and nine months in state prison even as he continued to deny any role in Floyd’s death.
Tou Thao, who had held crowds back as other officers restrained Floyd, was found guilty of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter by a jury in May. He had claimed that he merely served as a “human traffic cone” during the deadly encounter.
Floyd’s murder by white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin triggered a wave of protests across the US that eventually spread around the world, prompting a reckoning with police brutality and racism.
At the hearing, Thao said that he was “distressed” by Floyd’s death but denied any role in it. “I did not commit these crimes,” he said. “My conscience is clear. I will not be a Judas nor join a mob in self-preservation or betray my God.”
Presiding Hennepin county judge Peter Cahill responded that after thee years of reflection, he was “hoping for a little more remorse” from Thao and a little less “preaching”.
In a 177-page ruling, Cahill said Thao’s actions separated Chauvin and two other former officers, Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane, from the crowd.
“There is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Thao’s actions were objectively unreasonable from the perspective of a reasonable police officer, when viewed under the totality of the circumstances,” Cahill wrote.
The sentencing comes three days after a federal appeals court rejected Thao’s claim that he’d been subjected to prosecutorial misconduct and upheld his conviction for violating Floyd’s civil rights during his 2020 murder under the knee of Chauvin.
In that case, Thao was found to have deprived Floyd’s rights by failing to intervene in Chauvin’s use of unreasonable force. It was also found that he had been “deliberately indifferent to Floyd’s medical needs”.
Monday’s sentencing marks the end of the round of sentencing for all of the four Minneapolis police officers connected to the killing.
Thao is already serving three and a half years on the federal charges and will now be transferred to a Minnesota state prison to serve out his terms. Chauvin is serving concurrent state and federal sentences of more than 20 years while Kueng and Lane are serving three years.
