Derek Chauvin (in a Minnesota Department of Corrections mug shot), George Floyd (Image via attorney Ben Crump)
Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis Police officer who was convicted at the state level of murdering George Floyd on May 25, 2020 and subsequently convicted federally of violating Floyd’s civil rights, submitted a federal pro se filing Monday that advances a pathologist’s alternate theory that “an unusual tumor in [Floyd’s] pelvis” triggered a “catecholamine crisis” that “literally scared” Floyd to death.
Chauvin, now 47, is attempting to use that pathologist’s opinion to establish that a “miscarriage of justice” occurred, that he’s “actually innocent” of murdering George Floyd and, therefore, “actually innocent” of the criminal civil rights offenses he pleaded guilty to committing. The motion was filed to vacate his conviction and sentence in the federal case, for which Chauvin was sentenced in July 2022.
The inmate serving more than two decades in prison began by citing his months-long prison email correspondence with Kansas-based pathologist, Dr. William Schaetzel, who said he had “no doubt that Mr. Floyd expired due to his Paraganglioma and the subsequent consequences of a catecholamine crisis,” challenging Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker’s autopsy report as incomplete because it made “no mention” of “assay levels of the most potent hormone in the body, which this tumor is known to produce.”
A “paraganglioma,” according to the National Cancer Institute, is a “type of neuroendocrine tumor that forms near certain blood vessels and nerves outside of the adrenal glands.”
In February, Chauvin sent an email from his Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System (TRULINCS) account to Schaetzel. He prefaced the message by saying his correspondence would “look like a Japanese Haiku” since reply emails “only allow a handful of characters.” He wrote that he believed political and media pressure explained why George Floyd’s autopsy did not look further into the pelvic “extraadrenal-paraganglioma” that Dr. Baker identified in the report.
“I think there was pressure to say the ‘right’ diagnosis and not anything contrary to what the politicians/media would accept. Isn’t there something regarding medical ethics that M.D.’s are supposed to follow?” Chauvin asked. “As in if someone had a cancerous tumor or another medical condition they can’t pretend it doesn’t exist and everything is fine?”
Chauvin then asked if Schaetzel was available for a phone call.
“Thanks for the help so far. Not many people even willing to do that,” he wrote.
Schaetzel replied by saying “I can only imagine how hard life is for you.”
“The trouble I harbor is that I know they convicted innocent men,” the pathologist wrote, referring to Chauvin, and ex-Minneapolis cops Thomas Lane, Tou Thao, and J. Alexander Kueng. He urged Chauvin to tell his trial defense lawyer Eric Nelson about “get[ting] the assays done.”
He said Chauvin should consider himself “free to call me whenever you feel the need,” and he ended the email by writing “Keep the faith.”
In a March email to Chauvin, Schaetzel referred to himself as a “coward” who was reluctant to appear in court on Chauvin’s behalf as an expert witness at a theoretical new trial, but he said he would “drag [himself] in there” if the inmate’s appellate lawyer William Mohrman couldn’t find a “braver soul.”
“Otherwise, I couldn’t live with myself,” Schaetzel wrote.
The pathologist then surmised that the “crazy […] fury” to convict Chauvin made it a “distinct possibility,” in his mind, that maybe the tests were done but buried.
In June, Schaetzel forwarded Chauvin a note he sent to Lane and Kueng, which said he had an aha moment while “[w]atching the trial as a pathologist.”
“This has placed me in a rather uncomfortable position, not unlike Moses standing before the burning bush, saying, ‘Not me God, I am not good with words. Please choose someone else,” the note said.
Schaetzel theorized that Floyd had a crisis brought on by a tumor that “produce[s] abnormally high levels of catecholamines, typically either adrenaline or noradrenaline.”
“When the tumor releases these excessive amounts, the person experiences a catecholamine crisis. The symptoms and sheer terror a person experiences during a crisis is something; thankfully, we will never experience or comprehend,” the pathologist wrote. “These people are literally scared to death.”
Then the pathologist summarized his “professional opinion” on the matter.
“This is, in a nutshell, what, in my professional opinion happened to Mr. Floyd,” Schaetzel continued. “If you watch Officer’s Lane and Kueng’s body cam recording, knowing Mr. Floyd had this ticking time bomb, you can watch the catecholamine crisis unfold from start to finish.”
The pathologist said that there was “no doubt, in [his] opinion,” that Floyd died after “being startled by Officer Lane, which then precipitated Takotsybo’s myocarditits (acute heart failure) with resultant pulmonary edema and death.”
Schaetzel said that testing of catecholamine levels “might exonerate” the officers.
Under a supporting facts section of his motion, Chauvin also referred to a July 21 email from Dr. Paul Haney.
“[D]efendant received an e-mail from Dr. Paul Haney confirming that the Medical Examiner’s Report omitted Floyd’s sickling and paraganglioma conditions, and that ‘hypoxia was not present before death because of the lack of sickling [and] [t]here is no clear cut evidence for asphyxia as well as evidence of no major or minor trauma about the neck,” the filing said. “There is clear evidence that subsequent testing to further rule out other causes were not done.”
The entire Haney email was included among attached exhibits.
In it, Haney said “I believe your case was an FBI red flag,” claiming that “They just wanted a racial death during police custody to further their narrative or racial division.”
Haney said he called Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) office “since he is on a committee investigating FBI involving into the Weiner coverup, Epstein coverup, Hunter Biden coverup, Big Tech censorship/election tampering etc.,” before claiming the Secret Service was infected by a coverup “contagion.” He claimed “the cocaine in the White House coverup” was an example.
Near the end of his motion, seeking a new federal trial and an evidentiary hearing, Chauvin asserted he has “shown actual innocence because ‘in light of all the evidence’ – ‘it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have convicted him,”” if a jury was told Floyd’s “paraganglioma, sickling, and toxicology were his actual cause of death.”
Read Chauvin’s motion and prison email correspondence in full here.
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