Ex-cop trial to include ‘spark of life’ on Floyd

Minneapolis police officer in George Floyd’s death plan to use a legal doctrine called ‘spark of life’ to humanise Floyd in front of jurors.

It is a doctrine with roots in a 1985 state Supreme Court case and one that several legal experts said makes Minnesota a rarity in explicitly permitting such testimony ahead of a verdict.

Assistant Attorney General Matthew Frank told Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill on Wednesday that he plans to invoke the doctrine during Derek Chauvin’s trial. It allows prosecutors to call witnesses to testify about crime victims’ lives, ostensibly to portray them as more than a statistic. Defence attorneys complain that the doctrine allows prosecutors to play on jurors’ emotions and has nothing to do with evidence. If Cahill allows prosecutors to go too far, he could hand Chauvin grounds for an appeal.

Here is a look at the doctrine and the potential ramifications of it coming into play during Chauvin’s trial.

The doctrine emerged in 1985 when a defendant accused of killing a police officer argued to the Minnesota Supreme Court that the prosecutor prejudiced the jury with a speech about the officer’s childhood, his parents, and his marriage. The prosecutor became so emotional that the trial court had to take a recess.

The Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors could present evidence that a murder victim was “not just bones and sinews covered with flesh, but was imbued with the spark of life. The prosecution has some leeway to show that spark and present the victim as a human being as long as it is not an “attempt to invoke any undue sympathy or inflame the jury’s passions”.