Derek Chauvin, the former police officer serving a 22 and a half year sentence for killing George Floyd, was stabbed this Friday in a medium-security federal prison in Tucson, Arizona. The Minneapolis police officer suffered several serious injuries after the attack by another inmate, reports the Associated Press. The agency says emergency response personnel improvised measures to save the 47-year-old inmate’s life before transporting him to a hospital. His condition is stable and he is expected to survive the incident, according to ABC.
The name of Chauvin’s attacker has not been released by prison authorities, the Federal Bureau of Prisons. They have admitted in a brief statement that an inmate, whom they did not identify, was attacked this Friday around 12:30 at the Federal Correctional Institution of Tucson, located 16 kilometers southeast of the city of Arizona. “Employees isolated and contained the incident. At no time was the public in danger,” states the message from federal authorities. Prison visits have been suspended for the time being. The FBI is investigating the events.
It is not the first mishap in the prison in which Chauvin is serving his sentence. These have occurred due to several security failures and because he does not have the number of guards that he should. In November of last year, an inmate in the medium-security area took a gun and threatened to kill a visitor. The man fired the gun, but it malfunctioned and no one was injured.
Chauvin arrived in Tucson in August 2022. He came from a maximum-security state prison in Minnesota, where he spent most of his time in solitary confinement in a nine-square-foot cell for his own safety. His move to the west was so that he would have less harsh conditions. The federal prison in Arizona has a population of 266 inmates who are divided into maximum and medium security systems.
Chauvin is serving two sentences simultaneously in Arizona. A 21-year-old federal woman for violating the civil rights of George Floyd and another state sentence of second-degree murder for the man’s death, which occurred on May 25, 2020. The entire world witnessed the excessive brutality of Chauvin, a police officer white man who knelt on the neck of Floyd for nine and a half minutes, who was black and was suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill. The man said at least 25 times that he couldn’t breathe. The murder, captured on video by a woman passing by, sparked months of protests in various parts of the world and raised racial tension in the era of Donald Trump.
Experts in the prison system believed Chauvin would be safer in federal prison. Several prosecutors know that prisons are dangerous places for former police officers. The risks were greater even in state institutions due to the type of inmates behind bars. Many of them belong to gangs and criminal gangs. One of his lawyers, Eric Nelson, however, had asked the authorities that Chauvin not live with the general population, for fear that he would become the target of an attack. The former police officer received the harshest punishment. Three other Minneapolis police officers involved in Floyd’s arrest and killing received lesser sentences.
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This is the second incident to occur at a federal prison in the last six months. Larry Nassar, the doctor who abused hundreds of gymnasts, was stabbed ten times in the back and chest during an altercation with another inmate in a Florida jail. Nassar received a sentence of 175 years in prison. A month earlier, also in a federal institution in North Carolina, Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, committed suicide. Carelessness by guards left one of America’s most high-profile inmates to die by his own hands at age 81.
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