Derek Chauvin files third bid to overturn George Floyd murder conviction, alleging unlawful prosecution

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is mounting yet another legal challenge to his murder conviction, this time alleging that the prosecution itself was unlawfully authorized by Minnesota's governor, a claim his attorneys call a non-waivable structural error.

Chauvin's legal team filed a motion this week asking the Minnesota Court of Appeals to pause his pending appeal so the case can return to trial court, where they intend to argue that the original charges against him should never have been brought. The motion marks Chauvin's third petition for conviction relief since a jury found him guilty in April 2021 of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd, Fox News Digital reported.

At the center of the new filing is a specific allegation: that Governor Tim Walz improperly assigned prosecutorial authority to Attorney General Keith Ellison to handle the case. Chauvin's attorneys wrote in the motion that their client "became aware of additional violations of Mr. Chauvin's due process rights in the unlawful assignment of authority by Governor Tim Walz to Attorney General Keith Ellison to prosecute State v. Chauvin."

Beyond the prosecutor-assignment claim, the defense is raising several other procedural objections, failure to convene a grand jury, lack of court jurisdiction, and judicial bias. Chauvin's lawyers characterize all of these as "structural errors," a legal term meaning defects so fundamental that they cannot be waived or forgiven, even if a defendant failed to raise them at trial.

A judge already rejected Chauvin's last petition five months after it was filed

This is not Chauvin's first attempt to undo his conviction through post-trial proceedings. His most recent post-conviction petition was filed in November 2025. A judge denied the entire petition on May 1, more than five months later. Chauvin's team then filed an appeal of that denial in June, and it is that appeal his attorneys now want the court to pause so they can bring the new procedural claims before the trial court instead.

The legal maneuvering amounts to a two-track strategy: keep the appellate challenge alive while simultaneously opening a fresh front at the trial level. Whether the Minnesota Court of Appeals grants the stay remains to be seen. Fox News Digital reached out to the Minnesota Attorney General's office for comment, but no response was included in the reporting.

Floyd died on May 25, 2020, after Chauvin kneeled on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds while Floyd lay face down and handcuffed on the ground. Prosecutors said Floyd suffered a fatal lack of oxygen to the brain. The incident, captured on bystander video and police body cameras, set off nationwide protests and became a defining moment in the national debate over policing.

Elon Musk weighs in, calling the conviction unjust

The case drew fresh public attention after Elon Musk weighed in on the social platform X. Musk did not hold back, the New York Post reported:

"Derek Chauvin was unjustly convicted of murder, therefore he should be freed. The facts show that he was not the cause of death, nor did he at any time intend for a death to occur. Whatever else he may be, he is not a murderer. That is the truth."

Musk is not a party to the case, and his post does not appear to be cited in Chauvin's legal filings. But his statement reflects a view that has gained traction in some conservative and legal circles, that the political atmosphere surrounding Floyd's death made a fair trial difficult, if not impossible, and that the legal process was shaped more by public pressure than by ordinary prosecutorial standards.

The question of whether Walz had the authority to hand the case to Ellison is a procedural one, separate from the facts of Floyd's death. But procedural questions are not trivial. The American legal system treats the way charges are brought as a matter of constitutional significance. If a prosecution is initiated outside the bounds of lawful authority, the conviction can be vulnerable, regardless of the underlying evidence.

Criminal justice outcomes that seem disconnected from ordinary legal standards have become a recurring flashpoint in American public life, as seen in recent cases where serious criminal conduct resulted in surprisingly lenient sentences.

Three petitions and no relief, but the legal arguments keep shifting

Chauvin's persistence is notable. Three petitions for conviction relief, each raising different grounds, suggest a defense team working through every available procedural angle. The first two efforts failed. The third introduces claims that were not part of the original trial record, specifically, the allegation that the governor's assignment of the attorney general to prosecute was itself unlawful.

Whether a Minnesota court will find that argument persuasive is an open question. Courts generally give wide latitude to executive decisions about who prosecutes a case, and overturning a conviction on procedural grounds years after trial is rare. But "rare" is not "impossible," and the defense's framing of these issues as structural errors, defects that go to the very foundation of the court's authority to act, is designed to clear the high bar courts set for post-conviction relief.

The names of the specific attorneys representing Chauvin were not disclosed in the reporting, nor was the identity of the judge who denied the May 1 petition. The details of Chauvin's first two petitions for relief also remain unclear from available reporting.

What is clear is that the Chauvin case, more than six years after Floyd's death, is still working its way through the legal system. The political environment that surrounded the original trial, the protests, the national media coverage, the governor's decision to bring in the attorney general, is now the very terrain Chauvin's defense is contesting. The question is no longer just what happened on that Minneapolis street in May 2020, but whether the legal machinery that followed operated within the bounds the Constitution requires.

Due process is not a technicality. It is the difference between a conviction that holds and one that doesn't, and no amount of public emotion should be allowed to substitute for getting the process right.