If you turn on your TV and see Benjamin Crump, it usually means that something terrible has happened. Crump is the go-to civil-rights attorney for families who have lost a loved one to police violence; he is often referred to as “the black Gloria Allred.” In 2012, after Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, in a suburb of Orlando, Martin’s family hired Crump, who is based in Tallahassee, to represent them. He made the rounds on cable news to talk about the case; shortly afterward, protests erupted in Florida. (Zimmerman was eventually acquitted.) Two years later, Crump took on another high-profile case, after Michael Brown was shot dead by Darren Wilson, a police officer, in Ferguson, Missouri. (More protests; Wilson was never charged.) Now Crump is representing the family of George Floyd, who was killed, three weeks ago, by Derek Chauvin, a cop in Minneapolis, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. “It was the knee of the entire police department that killed George Floyd,” Crump said.
Crump is fifty years old, with a round face and a bald head. He wears a gold eagle lapel pin. One of his former law-school classmates recently said that, when a family hires Crump as its lawyer, he becomes its publicist, lobbyist, and therapist, too. “And I suspect,” the classmate added, “that, by the end, he becomes a family member.” Before Floyd’s funeral in Houston, Crump helped Floyd’s son, Quincy Mason, put on his necktie.
But some activists aren’t buying it. When Crump announced his involvement in the Floyd case, he was instantly derided on Twitter as an “opportunist” with a “losing track record.” (Stephon Adams, a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, tweeted, “If I am ever killed by a police or by a white person PLEASE MAKE SURE MY FAMILY DOES NOT HIRE BEN CRUMP! He is just as horrible as those ambulance chasing attorneys.”)
Some of this criticism seems to stem from a misunderstanding of Crump’s role in criminal cases. In the event of a police killing, murder and manslaughter cases are tried by local prosecutors, not by attorneys for hire. In the Floyd case, the prosecution of Chauvin, and of the three other cops who helped him restrain Floyd, will be led by Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general. While the state works on the criminal case, Crump will pursue civil action: a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city of Minneapolis.
Given how sympathetic juries tend to be toward police officers, the civil case is often the only case that can be won. Crump helped Michael Brown’s family win a $1.5 million settlement from the city of Ferguson, and he helped Trayvon Martin’s family settle, for an undisclosed sum, with the homeowners’ association in the neighborhood where Martin was killed. If Crump loses a case, he doesn’t charge anything. But if he wins he takes a third of the money awarded. He has fought more than two hundred police-violence cases, and he has won cash settlements in all of them. “We have never not recovered for these families,” he said. But the officers rarely end up in prison, and the murders go on. Crump could be the winningest attorney in the country who still reeks of failure.
Other people say that, even if Crump did not lead those unsuccessful criminal cases, he’s still partly responsible for losing them. He is known for generating buzz before a trial. (“We can’t control anything in the criminal case,” he said. “So all you can do is try to advocate and argue in the court of public opinion.”) This publicity can be crucial; sometimes it’s the only reason a trial happens at all. Crump is one of the lawyers for the family of Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger who was killed by two white men in Georgia, in February. It was only after a video of the shooting went viral that the two men were arrested, seventy-four days after the murder. But, when an entire nation is out for blood, prosecutors can feel pressured to overcharge defendants. (After George Zimmerman’s trial, legal analysts said that if the prosecutors had pursued a charge of manslaughter, rather than the more serious one of second-degree murder, they would have been more likely to secure a conviction.)
In the past couple of weeks, the charges against the cops who killed George Floyd have been elevated. Chauvin was initially charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, but prosecutors then added a charge of second-degree murder. (The other three officers now face charges of aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter.) The elevated charges could add up to an extra thirty years in prison, but, according to Rachel Barkow, a criminal-law professor and a vice-dean at the N.Y.U. School of Law, they could make conviction much trickier. “It is absolutely the case that it’ll be harder to win on the second-degree-murder theory than it would be on third-degree,” she said. “We’re talking about it now, in the middle of nationwide protests and the horror of the video, but these cases go to juries, and there they become a bit more complicated.”
Crump is calling for the charges to be upped once again, to first-degree murder. This would mean proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the murder of George Floyd was premeditated. “We think that it can be proved,” Crump said. “We think that there was intent. When the officer says, on the body-cam audio, ‘He doesn’t have a pulse, we should turn him on his side,’ and Chauvin says, ‘Nope, we keep him in this position,’ Chauvin is literally telling them, ‘I intend to cause serious bodily harm to him.’ That’s premeditated murder.”
If convicted, Chauvin would get life in prison. Kami Chavis, a professor of law and the director of the criminal-justice program at Wake Forest University School of Law, in North Carolina, said that this drive for a first-degree charge likely stems from “years of seeing black lives treated like they don’t matter.” Still, she said, “when I look at the evidence we have at this point, I believe that second-degree murder is appropriate.” Even the Internet mob is asking Crump to stand down. “We are all literally begging you to keep the charges at 2nd degree so there’s actually a conviction,” @0liviaGrace_ tweeted.
Asked about these critiques, Crump said, “If this was a black person who did it, nobody would be questioning whether it’s first-degree murder. So we’re saying charge him to the full extent of the law.”
How does Crump end up on so many high-profile police-violence cases? “There aren’t many options for black people when they get killed by the police,” he explained. “What are you gonna do? Turn to the police? They’re the ones who killed you.” A couple of months before George Floyd was murdered, Breonna Taylor, a young E.M.T. in Louisville, Kentucky, was shot at least eight times by the police during a raid at her home. The cops who killed Taylor haven’t been arrested. They haven’t even been fired. But Crump’s working on it. “We’ve already filed the lawsuit,” he said. ♦
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