J. Alexander Kueng pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter and will now serve a new federal sentence for violating the civil rights of an African-American man on that fateful January 25, 2020
The United States Justice has sentenced J. Alexander Kueng, one of the former Minneapolis Police officers who were involved in the death of George Floyd, to three and a half years in prison, who died in January 2020 due to a strike heart attack after another officer, Derek Chauvin, squeezed her neck for more than nine minutes.
As early as last October, when Kueng’s trial was to begin, he pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter to try to get the state to drop the charges against him for aiding and abetting a crime. 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 death of the US citizen in Minnesota sparked a wave of protests internationally, but especially in the United States, against racism and under the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ (‘Black lives matter’).
For their part, the lawyers who defend the interests of the Floyd family have acknowledged in a statement that this sentence at the state level, which is added to the federal one, “offers justice.” “As the family faces another Christmas season without George, we hope that moments like these 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 fateful arrest. Chauvin was already sentenced in June 2021 to 22.5 years in prison by a state court charged with multiple counts of murder. A state court also upheld a 21-year prison sentence.
Kueng and Thao have been convicted of federal charges for the murder and found guilty of violating Floyd’s civil rights and failing to intervene to arrest Chauvin during his arrest, according to CNN.
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.