How many miscarriages of justice must one man endure?

Derek Chauvin, the convicted murderer of George Floyd who was recently stabbed 22 times by an FBI informant, is recovering, and has just been released from the hospital. He has, however, been sent back to the same Arizona prison unit where he was stabbed, with no additional protection.

According to a Monday report from Rochester, Minnesota’s KTSP, Chauvin’s attorney Gregory Erickson said: “I had a telephone conference with Derek’s family yesterday, and they confirmed that his medical condition has improved to the extent that he has been removed from the trauma care facility at a local Tucson hospital and returned to prison custody for his follow up care.” So much for the good news. However: “His family is very concerned about the facility’s capacity to protect Derek from further harm. They remain unassured that any changes have been made to the faulty procedures that allowed Derek’s attack to occur in the first place.”

Indeed. If the Biden regime and its allies and henchmen throughout our green and pleasant land hadn’t made it so abundantly clear that fair play and equal justice for all are absolutely their number-one priorities in all cases, without fear or favor, one might almost get the impression that powerful people wouldn’t be troubled in the least if Derek Chauvin were found dead in that Arizona prison one day soon. He is, after all, mightily inconvenient for their narrative.

When Chauvin was stabbed, he was in the law library, studying possible avenues for an appeal that might reverse the outcome of his manifestly unjust first trial. In other words, he hadn’t given up and accepted his fate as the symbol of America’s systemic racial injustice and the cruel race-based unfairness of our police forces. As long as he remains alive, Derek Chauvin could bring the whole systemic racism house of cards down on the heads of the Critical Race Theorists, and that will never do.

Even long after he dies what any decent person hopes will be a natural death at a ripe old age, Chauvin will continue to be a symbol of the decline of equal justice under the law in America. But the injustice was not done to his alleged victim George Floyd. It is being done to Derek Chauvin.

Although Floyd has become a secular saint and Chauvin a symbol of evil, the simple fact remains that Chauvin is not guilty. Chauvin is supposed to have murdered Floyd by holding his knee on Floyd’s neck despite the victim’s cries that he could not breathe. The autopsy report, however, showed “no life-threatening injuries” and no “blunt force injuries” to the neck; thus if Chauvin had murdered Floyd, he did it with extreme subtlety. The great man, however, did have fentanyl in his system; could that have had anything to do with his death?

Chauvin’s trial didn’t address that question, and its outcome was a foregone conclusion. Chauvin’s supposed murder of Floyd was Exhibit A in the case against not just the accused cop, but against all white Americans and the United States itself. Chauvin and Floyd were too valuable as symbols for Chauvin possibly to get a fair trial, and he didn’t.

Today, Chauvin remains too valuable as a symbol to have his conviction overturned and be released, because no matter what the evidence says, to exonerate him would be to confirm all of the Left’s charges about racism and white privilege in America. So Chauvin not only remains in prison, but is left vulnerable to attacks from other inmates, for protecting him would be likewise racist.

America isn’t supposed to work this way. It is supposed to be, and for a considerable period largely was, a nation in which an accused person could get a fair trial no matter how unpopular he was, or how much he was associated with an unjust cause. This principle, in fact, has been part of the United States since before the Declaration of Independence.

But no more. Paradoxically, the trial of Derek Chauvin was decided before it even started by the color of each man’s skin. If Chauvin had been black and Floyd white, Chauvin never would have been tried, much less convicted. But the angry gods of our insane age demand sacrifices, and have chosen Derek Chauvin as a victim. Their next victim could be any one of us.

Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer