Will Jury Hear About George Floyd's Prior Arrest?

a fair trial. The judge has yet to decide on the defense attorney's renewed motion to move the trial out of Minneapolis, and both sides clashed today over how much the jury should hear of Floyd's own actions during a drug arrest. In joining me is Krista Groshek, a former public defender and managing attorney of Groshek Law in Minneapolis, Christa. How unusual is it to have a civil settlement before a criminal trial. It's extraordinarily unusual. In fact, I don't

think it's ever happened in Minnesota. The cases that I am familiar with and some other ones that I um looked up all perceived in the same way. The criminal case goes to trial first and then the civil case gets judicated. So this is extraordinarily strange. And you know, it's been sort of postulated that there's a fair amount of manipulation and maneuvering with some of these things, and I don't know how one gets past that idea when

you see this settlement occurring. In jury selection now on one hand, at least to the curred in jury selection right for sure. If it hadn't, I don't know how they could move forward. I think a mistrial motion would have been granted. But this has never happened before, and we've never had a settlement of this size before. I mean this, this is an astronomical settlement. Explain why the

news of the settlement might prejudice the jury. It is a very very difficult things to get jurors to understand the difference between you know, different kinds of litigation in cases, especially what it involves the same set of facts. I think, for example, with the O J. Case, Ray was acquitted but then later paid the family a large civil settlement.

There was a number of people who once they saw that went oh well of course, because he was guilty, right, So so the same inference flies there that I think is likely to apply here. I don't know how a jury can conceptually wrap their head around that, especially because the most information they're going to be given about the civil case is in jury selection, and the courts like it's civil, different standards of proof, different lawyers write, different

courts state versus federal. Don't worry yourself about that. I don't think that is enough of an explanation for them to hang their hats on to go, yeah, you're right, I'm just going to disregard the fact that that happened is hugely prejudicial to the defense, and in fact, it's kind of ridiculous. Um, I think at best, if you're responsible. What's interesting is Keith Ellison as our Minnesota Attorney General,

and his office is executing Derek Chauvin. His son is on the Minneapolis City Council that awarded this large civil settlement. When Keith Ellison was asked if he knew about the settlement prior to it being announced, his answer was no comment. Benjamin Crump, the family's attorney, has said, well, it's the family's Seventh Amendment right and also that the publicity about the settlement is slight compared to the publicity about George

Floyd's death. I think that's a ridiculous assertion. Let's see it in the Seventh Amendment. So people have a right to you know, have their controversies examined in court and settled. Okay, we know that. But you know certainly that talks about dollar settlements. Right, this is about money. This is about Savin's fighting for his liberty, his life, his reputation. And you know, I don't so much just blame the family,

and I don't blame Crump. Fine, you know, he's going to push for whatever leverage he can get at whatever time he can get it. He can do that. There's something wrong with him doing out. Lawyers positioned themselves all the time, right, it's our job to do that. He positioned his clients well, and he got, you know, a great settlement to them. So I don't think the family is doing anything wrong. I think the city was irresponsible. I mean, the city, you know, in theory to want

all of its citizens to have a fair trial. I understand they also want their citizens not to be victims of what they believe was police brutality, et cetera. But there's a time and a place to figure that out and still afford the person on trial of fair trial. I think the city government is to blame, and Jacob Fry is that's part of it. He's our mayor. And he opened his huge mouth shortly after this video footage came out and he said he think said Derek Scholwen

and his cap you know colleagues are all guilty. And he fired him without pay, you know or whatever. His police aren't fired him without pay, and he publicized it then so did our governor, so the chief of police. I mean, these guys have engaged in this pattern of irresponsibility since the beginning, and frankly, my opinion, they should be ashamed. When this was first brought up by the defense, the judge seemed to indicate that, yes, you know, this

was a concern that there might be a problem. He called back some of the jurors and requestioned them and got rid of two. But it seems as if it's going to be very hard to move the trial, to get him to move the trial out of Minneapolis once jury selections already started. So this judge is a guy on a mission. And he approaches all of his cases the way I've I've tried cases in front of him. When you're set for trial, you go trial. He keeps

cases moving. He doesn't allow for a lot of what I would call d aliensis or timely thing in jury selection. Some judges are more liberal about it. You can really get to know your jury is more. He doesn't really allow for a lot of that. He takes the reins like he did when he brought the seven jurors back, so frequently asked questions, so kind of hurry lawyers along. He wants cases to move. And you know the city has spent millions of dollars and getting this case ready

to try. From your additional officers, snipers that sit on the roof, you know, there's no court trials and jury trials happening in Hennison County. Yellow. They might add one more for some reason, but that was the plan. The Chauvin trial gets the whole courthouse, twenty six floors and twenty six things for courtrooms a piece. Hundreds of court hearings are shut down because of Chauvin. And so I think he's on a mission. He's gonna try to make that happen, and you know, he's kind of in a pickle.

This is out there now, right, and so it's time going to cure it and people really going to forget about it. I don't know. I think that's unlikely. So I don't think it continue would really helps. Maybe it's a greater likelihood that people outstate, you know, living in rural areas are less engaged and I'm not watching the trial every day like we are here in Minneapolis. I personally thought from the beginning that would have been the

right move, you know, moved this trial out states. But you know, there's a lot of advantages that come to the defense if you move without state. It tends to be that people who live in rural areas. I'm more pro police, so I think the other thing the court thought and of security. I mean, Henneton County has state of the art everything, and so they'd be in a better position people wise, and security from electronics, you know, contraptions that they used to monitor and watch people. He

thought that could do it better there. But he's in a bad spot. What do you do? It's out there, and so now he's got to determine if the lawyers can answers questions to get to the heart of but not they're biased. And whether or not he's got a bias or poison pool, that's what he's got to figure out, and that's going to take time. So I wouldn't say it's out of the question, but it does seem like if he can push through, he will, and that's consistent with what I know of Judge k. Hill. Let's talk

about some of the motions that are pending. The defense wants to tell the jury about Floyd's arrest for drugs in how likely is it that the judge will allow that evidence? In the difference between the defense bringing the

motion in the past and now is that. It's my understanding that the defense was recently disclosed about a thousand pages of additional information, some of which included details about that arrest and in particular what Mr Floyd was told about his use of opioids at that arrest, and I

think jud Candle is really interested in it. The new information showed that he behaved almost identically to how he did in the case that's being tried, you know, saying he couldn't breathe calling out for his mama, claiming to be disabled. What they saw was, you know, he was literally eating chewing drugs in front of them because they I guess, I've made an arrest for possession or styles of controlled substances, and so he's shotting, you know, handfuls

of sentinel pills into his mouth. What they found when they took him to the hospital later to claiming again of having troubled breathing, is that he hadn't ingested so much opioid that he was at risk then for a heart attack, and he was told that then, and so this becomes evidence that particularly relevant to the defenses theory of causation, right that it was the drugs, or it was the covid, or it was other health condition like you know, being prone to heart disease, whatever that caused

his death, not the the knee on the neck. And so typically speaking, this kind of evidence is called alternative perpetrator evidence. Judge keeps calling it reverse fregal. So that's where a defense attorney would say, hey, you know, my clients didn't shoot him, this other guy did. Well, we know nobody else had their knee on neck. And so what it is is this is an alternative cause type argument. So it's kind of a creative way to look at

that legal tool, if you will, or theory. And I think the judge is really interested in letting the defense introduce at least a part of that because it bolsters their causation theory. And it sounds to me if he does let it in, he'll create a very nuanced order that says you can let this in but not that in. If you step over here, then that's going to be a problem because the other side can introduce that. But I think he's particularly interested in giving the defense at

least an opportunity to present some of that. The prosecutor said that the defense is doing a full on trial of George Floyd who's not on trial. Doesn't that happen frequently in criminal cases the defense tries to bring in information that may not be helpful to the victim. You're exactly right. You know, there's limits to when and how we do that, for example, in a rape case as the rape shield. So you know, if my theory of the cases, she was you know, or he was quote

unquote consenting, or the one who invited the encounter. And I want to point to the fact that they do this on a regular basis this is a pattern. I might have difficulty doing that. But if I want to introduce evidence that my client was setting this person up, because when they claimed right before and they set somebody else up with fault allegations, you know, this becomes that victim's modus operandi and it supports my claim that the

charges are fault. So character evidence isn't typically admitted, but if you can fit it into an exception like modus operandi appsence of mistake, right, you can get it in typically speaking, And this is where this trial has sort of turned on its head. Is that productive trying to introduce this stuff on defense? They try to dirty up the defendant by saying, well, this is what he always does,

right know. Reverse freetel allows the defense to introduce this as to alternative perpetrators, and now this judge is saying it also applies to alternative causes. You know, I don't know how much we're really dirtying up George Floyd's character with regard to allege drug use, because we know from the incident, you know, in the case that we're trying, he had enough sent and on a system you know, I could kill him. That's already out there, it is

what it is. Do you think that in the end that it's going to be the jurors looking at that video for nine minutes and how hard is it to overcome that? In some ways as good that that video went viral when it did, because everybody's seen it were sort of desensitized to it right to a degree, you know. I mean the first time I watched it, you know, uh, it made me tear up, you know, the second or third time, right, you just get more used to the

fact that that's what happened. I think, um, what the defense will try to do is place a lot of emphasis on their experts, who are going to say, yeah, I you know, I see the video, but when I look at the forensic evidence, there is no merit to the contention that the knee on the neck is what killed him. And so you know, really working hard to take emotion out of that. And I think the defense will be sensible and argue, look, we're not saying this

is like great police behavior. We're not even saying that, you know, this was probably the best choice to make, but it's not criminal, right, we can we we cannot like this, we can you know, want things to be different in the future. Right. We know there's some laws pass will address that, but this isn't criminal because remember, in order for Chauvin to be guilty, he had to have caused the death, and in light of everything else that Floyd had going on, you know, in his body literally,

the state just can't prove that. So we cannot like this, and we can believe that change is warranted, right and rules and regulations, um, But that doesn't mean that Chauvin's guilty. Thanks Krista. That's Krista Grosscheck, managing attorney of gros Check Law. There are some surprising results in the latest jobs data concerning men who have graduate and professional credentials. Joining me

is Bloomberg opinion columnist Justin Fox. Justin people usually think the more education you have, the better your job is. What do the stats show? They show that that's generally true. I mean pretty much across the board, if you have more education, you're both more likely to be employed and

your wages are higher. But I was looking at the February job data for various things, especially comparing men and women in different categories and how they have fared over the past here, and I noticed, I mean, it's been happening for a few years. It turned out that men who just have a bachelor's degree have a higher employment rate, a higher percentage of all of them have jobs than men who have an advanced degree. And that's nothing like that that I know of anywhere else in the statistics

where more education results in less employment. They've only been releasing those statistics in two thousand fifteen, and it's been true almost every month since then. Just to clarify, it's not true with women. Correct, Women who um have advanced degrees are more likely to have jobs than women with just a bachelor's degree. What's the percentage of men in the population who have graduate or professional degrees. Researchers looked

into this. I can't say for certain not, but I checked in with a couple of people who've done work on both sociologists actually have done work on gender and education and employment, and neither of them had ever noticed this before, although one of them now wants to look into it. And what can we attribute this to, I mean, possibly nothing at all. It's just it's a pretty small difference, and you know, it might not be any big deal.

I guess the things that sort of we're going around in my head and with a couple of people I talked to were One possibility is because in the pay data, which doesn't come out quite as frequently, but men with advanced degrees, especially professional degrees like MBAs, they make more money than anybody else, and so it's not like this is some disadvantaged, struggling group. So it might be that a bunch of them just quit their job made so much money that they've dropped out of the labor force.

Another one that has but suggested to be by a couple of people since the thing we've published, is that men with advanced degrees are more likely to be married to her success women, and you know, might have dropped out of their labor force because their wife has become a ceo UM. The only thing is that it's just a little harder to imagine that those numbers of people are so large that they can really affect this. It's like that, although once again the number of men with

advanced degrees is pretty large too. So basically number one answer to why this discrimancy is there is probably not a big deal, maybe a kirk of the data, maybe having to do with some risks dropping out. But the other thing that I've watched over the last couple of years i've looked at education data, is men really are becoming much less likely than women to get degrees of

pretty much any sort. I mean, it's been true for undergraduate degrees since the seventies, graduate school enrollment overall, since law school. It just happened a couple of years ago, two thousand sixteen, that women became the majority of law students, And the most recent data is from the fall of two thousand eighteen, women made up fifty six percent of

undergraduate in sixty of graduate students. There are studies done of like like the highest prestige PhD programs, they're still dominated by men, the highest paying jobs, and laws still dominated by and but you look at the fields where women sort of dominate the graduate degree, and a lot of them they're not super high paid, but they're super low unemployment rates, like nursing and education, And so maybe there's something actually going on there where women are doing

a somewhat better job of targeting their education for employment. Although the one caveat there is still overall, across most different groups by education and race and a lot women are less likely to be employed than men are partly just because they tend to get stuck with care responsibilities for kids and other relatives that men used to don't.

What did you learn about law school and lawyers? I mean, basically law school had sort of resisted the trend towards being majority women that other a lot of other programs had, but it finally and and it definitely has been a bee in some quarters that Trump getting elected, although I can't really explain why it would have happened in two thousand sixteen, but basically a lot of women, we're sort of strongly motivated to act and look for ways to

fight for their own rights and other people's rights, and that that had driven this bump in law school admissions, because I mean, law school applications have been following for a long time and they finally sort of bottomed out and bounced back a little bit over the last five years. It's women that are driving that, not men. And what

about the earnings of men and women? I mean, in general, they're higher for men were just about everything they have annual censusy with those annual data, and basically, you know, the highest earnings group by education as men with professional degrees who have median earnings of a hundred thirty six thousand in two thousand nineteen, and women with professional degrees have median earnings of eighty eight thousand, three one, so a lot different and those with just bachelor's degree. It's

actually a smaller gap for men as for women. Thanks Justin That's Bloomberg opinion columnist Justin Fox. Jones day system for paying attorneys is so mysterious that some have dubbed it a black box, but five lawyers who claimed the black box waters down women lawyers compensation recently dropped their

lawsuit against the firm. The women had alleged that paid decisions are controlled exclusively by jones Day's managing partner based on subjective factors that aren't disclosed to the firm's lawyers, But five of the six women who brought the suit told a federal judge on March eleven that they're withdrawing it. Their attorneys and jones Day representatives declined to say whether

the case had been settled. The lawsuit will go forward, with one plaintiff, former jones Day lawyer Katrina Henderson, continuing the suit. Joining me is Aaron mulvaney, Senior legal reporter at Bloomberg Law Aaron first of all, explain why the compensation system at Jones's Day is referred to as a

black box. So Jones Day has been excused of having that black box, UM because these female attorneys that sued the law firm say that the managers keep it very secret what other partners are getting paid, and so it's basically a matter of transparency about the compensation among lawyers at the firm. Is a managing partner making all these decisions without input from other partners? Is that unusual in

a law firm. I'm not sure if it's unusual, But the female attorneys who pointed it out UM in their lawsuits UM say that that led to that system that kind of led that kept in secret and there was a a possible bias coming from a top down system that that had a preference for possibly male partners, was the claim and the lawsuit, and they also claimed that it was unusual among law firms UM to have that kind of system. And as far as this lawsuit, five

of the six women are withdrawing. Tell us about that the lawsuit is still going on but with less people. Yes, the lawsuits that was filed UM. The news last week was that uh, five of the six women who filed who were part of the original lawsuit UM withdrew their claims and one of the women will be moving forward, but the others will not be. And there are very few details on whether there was that was because if there was a settlement UM or something like that, what

else could it be besides a settlement. I'm trying to imagine what else would get five people to withdraw their complaint. Well, in a statement the women, the women said that the paid data that was perfected by the firm UM. They said that the review of pay data that Jones Day was forced to turn over didn't support allegations of widespread

pay disparities. So it's it's possible they didn't think they had a case moving forward, but obviously I'm just speculating at this At this point, I think one of the purposes of this lawsuit was to try to UM to have a voice for all the female lawyers at the firm and not just a few of them, And so

I think that it's unclear what happened. You know, the lawyers on both sides are being mum about what exactly happened in this case, is the problem with a black box or a system with no transparency that then there is a reason to suspect that there are disparities in compensation.

I think the answer to that question is that a lot of the advocates right now who really want to push for equal pay believe that a key to equality is transparency and have an empowering workers with knowledge about what their coworkers make, and so a lot of states

have started pushing proposals like that. A few have um some some transparency laws are in place, like in California, Washington, and Maryland that allow a job applicant to ask a salary range for a position, which is almost as far as Colorado has gone as far as to ask employers to post the job range for that position, um, no matter if it's an applicant or um someone who currently

works there. I think this is kind of the next wave, and the conversation about how to get to equal pay is to talk about transparency and how to address disparities by giving the workers themselves knowledge about what they make. Several big law firms have faced discrimination claims in recent years. Tell us about the lawsuits against Jones Day and where they stand yes. Jones Day has been targeted by UH several lawsuits claiming UH equal pay and promotions for female partners.

There have been settlements UM before there there have also been and they've all had these kind of similar complaints about lack of transparency about how attorneys are paid and you know, even retaliation against UM women who complain about this kind of male dominated culture at jones Day. And

then there have also been lawsuits. Jones Day is also fighting a lawsuit UM from a married couple who actually worked at jones Day and they they were accusing the company of UM Gender and Equities for the firm for the leave policy, which is another way that they believe that there was an imbalance between men and women at the firm. But jones Day is not the only law firm to be sued by lawyers. You have Morrison and Forrester.

Oh yeah, Morrison and Forrester actually has a similar lawsuit UM filed against them by a pair of women lawyers, also against the maternity leaves policy and alleging that they were punished for taking off time related to pregnancies. And that case appears to be heading to trial. And there have been other cases against law firms UM that have settled Like I mentioned the Jones Day lawsuit previously. Uh, it's chad Bourne and Park which is acquired by Norton

Rose Bulbright. They settled a lawsuit in two thousand and eighteen, and Ogletry and Deacons Um also settled similar suits and and disclosed terms in recent years. A lot of settlements, not too many trials. Thanks so much, Aaron. That's Aaron mulvaney, senior legal reporter at Bloomberg Law. And that's a for this edition of the Bloomberg Law Show. Remember you can always at the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and at

www dot Bloomberg dot com slash podcast Slash Law. I'm June Grosso. Thanks so much for listening, and please tune into The Bloomberg Law Show every week night at ten pm Easter right here on Bloomberg Radio