MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Prosecutors trying a white former Minneapolis police officer in George Floyd’s death plan to use a legal doctrine called “spark of life” to humanize Floyd in front of jurors.
It’s a doctrine with roots in a 1985 state Supreme Court case, and one that several legal experts said makes Minnesota a rarity in explicitly permitting such testimony ahead of a verdict.
Assistant Attorney General Matthew Frank told Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill on Wednesday that he plans to invoke the doctrine during Derek Chauvin’s trial. It allows prosecutors to call witnesses to testify about crime victims’ lives, ostensibly to portray them as more than a statistic. Defense attorneys complain the doctrine allows prosecutors to play on jurors’ emotions and has nothing to do with evidence. If Cahill allows prosecutors to go too far, he could hand Chauvin grounds for an appeal.
Here’s a look at the doctrine and the potential ramifications of it coming into play during Chauvin’s trial.
WHAT IS THE “SPARK OF LIFE” DOCTRINE?
The doctrine emerged in 1985 when a defendant accused of killing a police officer argued to the Minnesota Supreme Court that the prosecutor prejudiced the jury with a speech about the officer’s childhood, his parents and his marriage. The prosecutor became so emotional the trial court had to take a recess.
The Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors could present evidence that a murder victim was “not just bones and sinews covered with flesh, but was imbued with the spark of life. The prosecution has some leeway to show that spark and present the victim as a human being as long as it is not an “attempt to invoke any undue sympathy or inflame the jury’s passions.”
HOW IS SPARK-OF-LIFE TESTIMONY RELEVANT?
Victim statements about the impact a crime has had on their lives are common during the sentencing portion of trials across the country. But allowing the introduction of deep biographical information about a victim ahead of a verdict appears to be unique to Minnesota.
The idea is to use witnesses to present a victim as a human being, essentially allowing the victim to speak from beyond the grave, legal observers say.
“This puts some personal nature back into the case for somebody who’s treated so impersonally in an unfortunately biased system,” Frank told Cahill.
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