The Minneapolis judge who presided over the murder of former police officer Derek Chauvin last year is probably the same judge who signed the banning ban on assault last week when police killed 22-year-old Amir Locke in a friend’s apartment.
Although related search warrants and affidavits remain sealed, Hennepin County Court spokesman Matt Lehmann confirmed to HuffPost that Judge Peter Cahill was the undersigned judge last week. This meant that Cahill would be the judge who reviewed and signed the search warrant applications.
“The court can only confirm information that is publicly available,” Lehmann said. “As the order is not yet publicly available, we cannot confirm whether Judge Cahill signed it.
NBC local affiliate KARE 11 said Saturday that Cahill had signed a ban on knocking, which Minneapolis police used to raid a downtown apartment where the black man slept before being startled to wake up and then kill him. The television station quoted an anonymous source familiar with the investigation as saying that Lehman had replied that Cahill “could not comment on this particular order or the order he was signing” because of the Minnesota Code of Judicial Conduct.
Cahill won national attention as a judge presiding over the trial of Chauvin, in which a white former officer was convicted of murder for kneeling on the neck of a black man on a Minneapolis street for more than nine minutes on May 25, 2020. The judge sentenced Chauvin to He was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison last year and banned from possessing firearms, ammunition or explosives for the rest of his life.
According to the bodycam video released Thursday night, a Minneapolis police team quietly unlocked the door to an apartment early Wednesday morning and began yelling at Locke, the legal owner of a gun, who was sleeping on a friend’s couch and wrapped in a blanket. A police officer is seen kicking the couch and shaking Locke to wake up before the 22-year-old grabs his gun nearby.
Officer Mark Hahnemann fired three shots at Locke, killing him about nine seconds after police first entered the apartment. Locke’s parents, Andre Locke and Karen Wells, called the incident an “execution.”
“Mr Locke did what many of us could do in the same confusing circumstances, he resorted to legal means of self-defense as he tried to figure out what was going on,” said Rob Doar, senior vice president of government affairs. Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus The group also issued a statement in 2016 after police fatally shot dead Minnesota black Filado Castilla when he told a police officer he had a legally owned gun in his purse.
Locke had both a gun license and a concealed carry license. His name is not mentioned in the order and he has no criminal record. Locke was an ambitious musician who planned to move to Dallas later this month to start his career and live closer to his mother.
The no-knock attack is part of an investigation into a St. Paul police homicide, according to Minneapolis Interim Police Chief Amelia Huffman. While St. Paul police requested MPD’s assistance in the investigation, KARE 11 reported that Minneapolis police were pushing for the order to be changed to a strike without strikes.
After Chauvin killed Floyd in 2020, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey introduced a policy against non-knocking guarantees, which his campaign described as a “ban.” In practice, however, the police were still allowed to carry out an action without knocking, as long as they announced themselves before crossing the threshold of the residence.
After Hahnemann killed Locke, Frey declared a moratorium on both the request and the execution of banning orders in the city, “to ensure the safety of both the public and employees until a new policy is drawn up.”
The strike-free orders have been heavily criticized locally and nationally as dangerous and ineffective, especially after the assassination of Breona Taylor, a 26-year-old black medical technician, two years ago in Louisville, Kentucky. Police fatally shot Taylor after breaking into her home without knocking, and she was met with gunfire by Taylor’s boyfriend, who said he did not know the intruders were police.
The mayor said the city would bring in civil rights activist Deray McKeson and University of Kentucky professor Pete Kraska to review and propose revisions to the department’s current policies. Both were important in supporting the “Breona law”, which allows orders without strikes in Kentucky only if there is “clear and convincing evidence” that the crime under investigation “would qualify a person if convicted as a violent crime.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison he said he planned to review the police killing last week. Ellison’s office is pursuing Chauvin and retired police officer Kim Potter, who was convicted in December of the fatal shooting of 20-year-old Daunte Wright during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, a suburb of Minneapolis.