This won’t be a popular opinion in the faculty lounge, but Derek Chauvin’s murder conviction in the George Floyd case wasn’t so much a dispensation of criminal justice as it was a lynching.

That’s right: Chauvin’s 22-and-a-half-year sentence was a race-based hanging — figuratively, in this case, but not one iota less racially motivated. Think about it: If that had been a black cop with his knee on the neck and shoulder of a noncompliant drugged-out career criminal with a deadly heart condition, South Minneapolis would’ve never gone up in flames. Nor would our nation have erupted in a summer of rage that cost more than two dozen lives and $2 billion in damages. Nor would the Marxist grifters who founded Black Lives Matter have been able to shake down one successful American corporation after another, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, and then go on a luxury home-buying spree.

All these things happened because Officer Derek Chauvin was white.

Which brings us to the point of all this: Chauvin was racially sacrificed to the “social justice” mob and wrongly convicted of murdering the unworthiest of martyrs, George Floyd. Because of this — because the legal deck was so grossly stacked against him — Chauvin deserves a pardon. He’ll never get one so long as a Democrat is in Minnesota’s governor’s mansion, but President Donald Trump could certainly do it.

Indeed, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro petitioned Trump to do exactly that via an open letter earlier this week. As Shapiro wrote:

George Floyd was high on fentanyl. He had a significant pre-existing heart condition. He was saying he could not breathe before he was even out of the car. Derek Chauvin … had his knee on George Floyd’s shoulder or back, not on his neck; this was confirmed by the autopsy, which showed no damage to George Floyd’s trachea. There was no accusation at trial that Derek Chauvin targeted George Floyd for his race.

Perhaps most significantly, there was massive overt pressure on the jury to return a guilty verdict regardless of the evidence or any semblance of impartial deliberation. This pressure took the form of threats, coercion, and intimidation. The Mayor of Minneapolis pre-judged the outcome of the trial and immediately issued a large settlement to the Floyd family. Then-President Biden, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and others pre-judged the outcome of the trial and took to national media to create pressure on the jury to go along with their preferred narrative.

Given all this, it’s hard to imagine the pressure that would’ve been on the Chauvin jury to return a guilty verdict. And so they did just that.

Shapiro concludes, “Make no mistake — the Derek Chauvin conviction represents the defining achievement of the Woke movement in American politics. The country cannot turn the page on that dark, divisive, and racist era without righting this terrible wrong.”

Notably, our own Mark Alexander has previously cited Floyd’s autopsy and other evidence when arguing that Chauvin was wrongfully convicted of murdering Floyd, and should be pardoned.

This strikes me as the right thing to do, and President Trump has shown time and again that he’s not averse to making tough decisions in the face of enormous political pressure. The question then becomes: Would Chauvin even want a pardon from Trump?

Let me explain. As president, Donald Trump’s power to pardon those convicted of federal crimes is absolute. But it doesn’t extend to state-level convictions, and Chauvin is serving his state and federal conviction concurrently, as agreed upon by federal prosecutors. As National Review’s Andrew McCarthy notes, “Though he went to trial in the state case, Chauvin voluntarily pled guilty to the federal charge.” That’s because he “understandably wants to serve any prison time in a federal facility,” which is likely safer than a state prison. (This doesn’t mean Chauvin is safe in federal prison — not at all. Recall that in November 2023, Chauvin was stabbed 22 times in a federal prison in Arizona by a former gang leader and FBI informant who said he specifically targeted Chauvin. Still, state prisons are notoriously dangerous for former cops.)

Chauvin lost his state-level appeal, so that conviction is final. (I would add that this is to the eternal disgrace and damnation of the Minnesota criminal justice system.) In addition, the Supreme Court refused to hear his federal case just over two years ago.

“It is possible,” McCarthy writes, “that the federal government could agree to let Chauvin continue serving his state time in federal custody. But the state and the feds would have to concur on that, and Chauvin would not have much assurance that the state would hold to such an agreement.”

In the meantime, as Shapiro puts it, “a man is now rotting in prison.”