The United States Justice has sentenced to three and a half years in prison J. Alexander Kueng, one of the former Minneapolis Police officers involved in the death of George Floyd, who in January 2020 died of cardiac arrest after another officer, Derek Chauvin, squeezed her neck for more than nine minutes.
As early as last October, when Kueng’s trial was set to begin, he pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter in an attempt to get the state to drop charges against him for aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter.
Kueng is currently serving a three-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights on that fateful January 25, when the U.S. citizen’s death in Minnesota sparked a wave of protests internationally, but especially in the United States, against racism and under the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’.
For their part, the lawyers defending the interests of the Floyd family have acknowledged in a statement that this state-level ruling, which is in addition to the federal one, «offers justice.» «As the family faces another holiday season without George, we hope that moments like these will continue to bring them some peace, knowing that George’s death was not in vain,» they said.
Kueng, along with the aforementioned Chauvin, Tou Thao and Thomas Lane are the four Minneapolis Police officers involved in Floyd’s fatal arrest. Chauvin was already sentenced in June 2021 to 22.5 years in prison by a state court on multiple counts of murder. A state court also upheld a 21-year prison sentence.
Kueng and Thao have been convicted on federal charges for the murder and have been found guilty on charges of violating Floyd’s civil rights and failing to intervene to stop Chauvin during his arrest maneuvers, U.S. CNN recalls.
Lane, the fourth officer who held Floyd’s legs during the arrest, pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter in the summer and was sentenced to three years in prison in September. He is serving that concurrently with a two-and-a-half-year federal sentence in Colorado.
