The former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, who was found guilty of killing George Floyd was stabbed by another prisoner on Friday.

According to information provided to him by his agency’s “federal law enforcement partners,” O’Hara informed KSTP that Chauvin was “in stable condition.” The attorney general’s office has “heard that [Chauvin] is expected to survive,” according to Ellison spokesman Brian Evans, the AP reports.

Chauvin is currently in the custody of the US Prisons Bureau, which has only revealed that an unidentified inmate at a Tucson lockup was hospitalized following an assault on Friday afternoon. It has not provided further details, citing privacy and safety concerns.

The sources included Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara and an official from the office of Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison.

Who is Derek Chauvin?

On May 25, 2020, outside of a convenience shop in Minneapolis, Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, 47, gained infamy over the world by putting his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes.

George Floyd, 46, was heard crying out, “I can’t breathe,” on bystander footage as Chauvin knelt on his neck, killing him. Street protests against racism and police violence erupted around the world after Floyd’s death. Chauvin was sentenced to 22 and a half years in jail after a Minnesota jury found him guilty of a state charge of second-degree murder. In addition, he was mandated to serve a concurrent 21-year term for violating Floyd’s federal civil rights.

George Floyd was charged by the shopkeeper of using a fake $20 note to purchase smokes on May 25, 2020, while he was shopping at the CUP Foods store in Minneapolis with two friends. Floyd was handcuffed and placed under arrest after the police were called.

Derek Chauvin, one of the attending cops, grabbed Floyd on the ground and had his knee pressed into his neck for over nine minutes, even as Floyd remained still on his stomach. As Floyd was calling out, “Mama!” and claiming he was having trouble breathing, bystanders took pictures of the incident with their cellphones and called at Chauvin and the other police to be gentle to him.

One of the biggest wrongful death judgments involving a police killing in American history was reached when the city of Minneapolis and Floyd’s family reached a $27 million settlement in their case.

These incidents raised awareness of the issue of systemic racism in American culture and influenced public opinion in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement. More police accountability was demanded, and Chauvin was found guilty of murder in 2021. It was one of the rare instances of police brutality that led to a conviction.

The Washington Post journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa’s biography of Floyd, “His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice” (2022), was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Derek Chauvin’s Tuscan Prison Violence

According to the AP’s report, Chauvin received “life-saving measures” from prison authorities before to being sent to a hospital for treatment.

Chauvin’s main jail in Tucson has been hampered by security failures and staffing shortages. This was the second prominent stabbing of a federal prisoner that had occurred since July, when a fellow prisoner in a Florida penitentiary stabbed Dr. Larry Nassar, a serial sexual abuser who had been found guilty.

In the meanwhile, in November of last year, a prisoner imprisoned in a different section of Tucson pulled out a gun and tried to kill an inmate in the head. The gun, which the prisoner shouldn’t have been allowed to possess, misfired, but nobody was harmed.

Derek Chauvin’s attorneys had campaigned to keep him isolated from the other inmates at the Tucson prison, claiming that he would become a target of violence.

Attorney Gregory Erickson of Derek Chauvin protested to the AP on Saturday, stating that his client’s family was left to rely on news sources for updates since federal prison officials had not been forthcoming about the stabbing that had occurred the day before.

“I find this lack of communication to be absolutely ridiculous,” Erickson told the AP in a statement. “It seems to be a sign of a badly managed facility and shows how Derek’s assault was permitted to occur.”

“He was duly convicted of his crimes and, like any incarcerated individual, he should be able to serve his sentence without fear of retaliation or violence,” said Ellison in a statement denouncing Chauvin’s stabbing.

Black Lives Matter Movement

In 2013, in reaction to the killer of Trayvon Martin’s acquittal, #BlackLivesMatter was established. The goal of the US, UK, and Canadian worldwide group Black Lives Matter worldwide Network Foundation, Inc. is to end white supremacy and develop local authority to stop violence against Black communities committed by the police and vigilantes.

“We are making instant gains in our lives by opposing and retaliating against acts of aggression, fostering Black creativity and ingenuity, and elevating Black joy”, the workers say.

Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patricia Khan-Cullors, three Black community organizers, cofounded BLM in 2013 as an online campaign utilizing the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media. Following the acquittal of German-Peruvian immigrant George Zimmerman on all charges related to his deadly shooting of unarmed Black adolescent Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, in February 2012, they founded BLM.

Following the police killings of two Black men who were unarmed, Eric Garner and Michael Brown, in 2014, the BLM movement grew. Garner passed away in Staten Island, New York, following an extended and unlawful choke hold by a white police officer, which was caught on camera by an onlooker. In Ferguson, Missouri, a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown.

Large-scale demonstrations in support of Black Lives Matter were sparked by these fatalities and the prosecutors’ decision not to file charges against the police, garnering attention on a national and international level.

Critics of BLM claimed a range of points, such as the denial that systematic racism occurs in the US and the promotion of violence against law enforcement. Opposition groups, such as White Lives Matter, founded by white nationalists, and Blue Lives Matter, which backs law enforcement, emerged in response to BLM.