DR. MARTIN TOBIN — PULMONOLOGIST AND EXPERT WITNESS EXTRAORDINAIRE
On Tuesday April 20, 2021 former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of the murder of George Floyd by a jury of his peers, consisting of six white people and six people of color.
The jury found Chauvin guilty on the three counts he faced: unintentional second-degree murder; third-degree murder; and second-degree manslaughter.
His scheduled sentencing will take place on June 16 in front of Judge Peter A. Cahill.
Following his conviction, Judge Cahill agreed to grant a prosecution motion to revoke Chauvin’s million dollar bail and Chauvin was remanded to police custody.
He was sent back to Oak Park Heights state prison where he had stayed following his 2020 arrest in the case, and is being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, due to “fears of his safety.”
The 45-year-old Chauvin was a member of the MPD from 2001–2020; he graduated from Metropolitan State University (MN.) in 2006, with a bachelor’s degree in law enforcement.
During his policing career, he was involved in three shootings, one of which was fatal.
He had 18 complaints on his official record, two of which ended with disciplinary measures levied against him.
In July 2020, after the murder charges were brought against him, Chauvin and his then-wife were separately charged in Washington County, Minnesota with multiple felony counts of tax evasion, related to allegedly fraudulent state income tax returns from 2014 to 2019.
Prosecutors state the couple under-reported their joint income by $464,433, including more than $95,000 from Chauvin’s off-duty security work.
The complaint also alleges failure to pay proper sales tax on a $100,000 BMW purchased in Minnesota in 2018; failure to declare income from Chauvin’s wife’s business; and improper deductions on a rental home.
Chauvin’s now ex-wife, a real estate agent and photographer, is a Hmong refugee from Laos and a 2018 “Mrs. Minnesota” beauty pageant winner.
She filed for divorce the day before he was arrested for Floyd’s death, and the divorce was approved in February 2021.
Yet, with all of that in mind, this is not about Derek Chauvin, convicted murderer.
Rather, it’s about one witness in his multi-week murder trial, Dr. Martin J. Tobin.
Tobin’s testimony was so powerful and compelling to the jury, that it would be no stretch to credit the pulmonologist and critical care doctor for sealing Chauvin’s fate.
“I don’t think I’ve seen an expert witness as effective as this,” said Mary Moriarty, the former chief public defender of Hennepin County, who had been following the televised trial.
“He appears to be the world’s foremost expert on this, and he explained everything in English, in layman’s terms.”
A winning formula to captivate and capture the jury.
Tobin, who specializes in the mechanics of breathing, presented the prosecution’s first extended testimony on a central question in the murder trial of Chauvin: how Floyd died.
“You’re seeing here [on the video showing George Floyd facedown on the street with Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck] fatal injury to the brain from a lack of oxygen,” Tobin asserted.
When the video was slowed down and viewed frame-to-frame, the jury could detect the briefest widening of Floyd’s eyes, what Tobin said, on the stand, represented his last conscious moment.
“One second he’s alive, and one second he’s no longer.
You can see his eyes — he’s conscious — and then you see that he isn’t.
That’s the moment the life goes out of his body.”
Tobin explained that Chauvin and other police officers had restricted Floyd’s breathing by flattening his rib cage against the pavement and pushing his cuffed hands into his torso, and by the placement of Chauvin’s knees on his neck and back.
The doctor pinpointed the moment he said Floyd had shown signs of a brain injury, four minutes before Chauvin lifted his knee from his body.
The jurors appeared to be riveted by Tobin’s uncanny knack for breaking down complex physiological concepts, at times scribbling notes in unison.
Using his hands and elbows to demonstrate how people breathe, he gave a basic anatomy lesson by asking jurors to palpate their own necks, while offering an artist’s rendering of how three officers, including Chauvin, had been positioned on Floyd.
Tobin stated that he had watched portions of the video evidence hundreds of times and was able to: calculate the exact amount of weight Chauvin had placed on Floyd’s neck (86.9 pounds); clock Floyd’s respiratory rate; and mark the instant he took his final breath: 8:25:15 p.m.
He reassured jurors that many of the medical terms they had heard during the trial — hypoxia, asphyxia, anoxia — all mean essentially the same thing, “a drastically low level of oxygen.”
The jury had heard repeatedly that police officers are taught that restraining people facedown is dangerous.
Tobin walked them through exactly why, noting first, that simply being in that particular prone position reduces lung capacity.
In addition, a knee on the neck compressed Floyd’s airway, and the weight on his back alone, made it three times harder than normal to breathe.
“A healthy person subjected to what Mr. Floyd was subjected to would have died as a result.”
As to the defense assertion that an elevated level of carbon dioxide found in Floyd’s blood was the result of fentanyl use, Tobin methodically repudiated the theory by attributing it instead, to the length of time he was not breathing, before he was given artificial breaths in an ambulance.
He expounded by indicating that if fentanyl was having a significant effect, Floyd’s respiratory rate would have been slower than normal, and if Floyd’s heart disease had been severe, it would have been more rapid.
Floyd’s respiratory rate was normal, he testified.
Dr. Tobin was adamant that Mr. Chauvin had caused Mr. Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020.
Based on Floyd’s visible respiratory rate before he went unconscious, any fentanyl in his system was “not having an effect” on his breathing.
When Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric J. Nelson, pushed back and continued to press his argument that Floyd’s death may have resulted from an overdose, Tobin was on it, yet again.
While agreeing with Nelson that Floyd’s breathing may have been inhibited if he had taken fentanyl before officers brought him to the ground, Tobin plainly stated that Floyd had never gone into a coma, as he would have done if he were overdosing.
“Mr. Floyd died from a low level of oxygen and this caused damage to his brain that we see, and it also caused a P.E.A. arrhythmia that caused his heart to stop.”
Finally, Tobin parried and refuted one last misconception about breathing: talking.
The ability to speak is not evidence of adequate oxygen intake.
Dr. Tobin testified that Mr. Floyd speaking — “I can’t breathe” — creates “a huge false sense of security,” that just because someone is speaking, and therefore expelling air, does not mean he is not about to die.
Tobin and the prosecution were imploring the jury to grasp and understand that reduced oxygen flow can be lethal.
And was exactly that, in this case.
“He’s [Floyd] jammed down against the street, and so the street is playing a major role in preventing him from expanding his chest…”
Two photos were shown of Floyd’s finger and knuckles digging into the street and the police cruiser’s tire, as he was being held down.
“To most people this doesn’t look terribly significant. But to a physiologist this is extraordinarily significant because this tells you that he has used up his resources and he is now literally trying to breathe with his fingers and knuckles…”
People who can’t breathe normally will use other ways to try to bring more air into their body.
“So he’s using his fingers and his knuckles against the street [and the tire] to crank up the right side of his chest. This is his only way to try and get air into the right lung.”
The prosecution called other witnesses of course, two of whom — Daniel Isenschmid, a forensic toxicologist, and Dr. William Smock, a professor of emergency medicine and the police surgeon for the Louisville Metro PD — undermined the claim that George Floyd died of an overdose.
Isenschmid testified that Floyd did not have significant levels of fentanyl in his system to cause his death.
Smock testified that, “That is not a fentanyl overdose. That is somebody begging to breathe.”
Key expert support, no doubt, but it was Dr. Martin Tobin who effectively closed the case.
Ten hours of jury deliberation was all it took.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in April 2021.]
