The jury is expected to hear closing arguments on Monday and could deliver a verdict in Mr. Chauvin’s trial next week.
He settled into a swiveling chair, sitting upright and a bit stiff, in a mostly empty courtroom. Holding a microphone in front of his chest, Derek Chauvin removed a blue mask to reveal a clean-shaven face. As his lawyer, Eric J. Nelson, asked a series of questions, Mr. Chauvin dipped his body toward the microphone and uttered the first words the public has heard from him in the more than 10 months since the death of George Floyd on May 25. “Have you made a decision today whether you intend to testify or whether you intend to invoke your Fifth Amendment privilege?” Mr. Nelson asked. “I will invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege today,” Mr. Chauvin said. With that, the defense rested its case in the murder trial of Mr. Chauvin, a former police officer. After 13 days of testimony, the jury was offered no glimpse behind the impassive expression maintained by Mr. Chauvin, hands in his pockets and sunglasses on his head, as he knelt on the neck of Mr. Floyd on a South Minneapolis street for more than nine minutes. The jury is expected to hear closing arguments on Monday and could deliver a verdict next week. The city is bracing for reaction from residents, including the potential for widespread unrest in the event that Mr. Chauvin is acquitted. The court plans to begin evacuating government buildings before the verdict is read. Convictions of police officers for on-duty killings are exceedingly rare. But Mr. Nelson faced a daunting task given the harrowing video that showed Mr. Floyd, who was Black, pleading for his life, then losing consciousness under the knee of Mr. Chauvin, a white officer, as bystanders shouted out that he was dying. “Let’s put it this way, Eric Nelson had one hell of a case to defend,” said Joe Friedberg, a prominent Minneapolis criminal defense lawyer. The defense had two main arguments: that the true cause of death was not Mr. Chauvin’s actions but Mr. Floyd’s underlying health conditions and his use of illicit drugs, and that Mr. Chauvin’s actions were reasonable in the face of Mr. Floyd’s resistance and what it framed as an angry, threatening crowd of onlookers. It is common for the defense portion of a trial to be much shorter because the burden of proof is on the prosecution, and that proved to be the case here. Mr. Nelson presented seven witnesses in two days, compared with 38 for the prosecution over 11 days. Mr. Nelson was stymied in some of his attempts to introduce evidence about Mr.
