Should Derek Chauvin face 30 years in prison? Criminal justice reform advocates say a long sentence would do more harm than good

• Derek Chauvin will be sentenced Friday for the murder of George Floyd.
• He faces up to 40 years in prison after a judge found aggravating factors warrant a longer sentence.
• Criminal justice reform advocates want accountability, but say a longer prison sentence isn't it.

Advocates for criminal justice reform want police to be held accountable for using excessive force, but when Derek Chauvin is sentenced Friday for the murder of George Floyd, they won't be rooting for maximum prison time.

A jury found Chauvin guilty of second degree murder, third degree murder and manslaughter in April. The average first-time offender convicted of second-degree murder in Minnesota is sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison.

Chauvin, however, faces up to 40 years behind bars after Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill found that aggravating factors in Floyd's death warrant a sentence that goes beyond the guidelines.

According to Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, an associate professor of sociology at Brown University, the US criminal justice system has become so racialized that it's easy to forget its goal is to protect society from dangerous people. Chauvin, she said, has proved to be a danger.

"There are so many Black people, Latinx people, who are in jail right now for drug crimes for decades of their lives," she said. "If this police officer then can get off with a little time served and a probation, it really shows that we have what [W. E. B.] Du Bois would call a double system of justice - a separate justice system for white people with privilege and power like Chauvin, and another side with undue severity for people of color and poor people."

But a long prison sentence is not what accountability looks like for Somil Trivedi, a senior staff attorney at the Criminal Law Reform Project.

"Unfortunately, because of America's long and sordid history with over-incarceration, we conflate accountability with long sentences," Trivedi said. "I think it's the wrong way to look at things because whatever we do to police officers, we're doing tenfold to people in the community, including the very people we're trying to protect from the Derek Chauvins in the world."

Advocates say long prison sentences aren't good for anyone

State prosecutors are seeking a 30-year prison sentence. Chauvin's defense team argues he should face only time served and probation, saying cops have shorter life spans than the general public.

Some research shows that longer prison sentences do not meaningfully reduce crime and, in some cases, can trigger recidivism. Long sentences also take incarcerated people away from their families, Trivedi said, potentially exposing them to addiction, depression, and violence. When they are released, they are more prone to misconduct, he added.

"I think that that same logic applies to police officers, and therefore I'm not banging the drum for a long sentence for Derek Chauvin," he said.

Trivedi says instead of relying on the fear of prosecution to keep officers from using excessive force, there should be systemic efforts to reduce the police footprint on communities and ensure aggressive officers don't stay on the force.

"We need to be making it easier for police officers to get fired, making their records more transparent, abolishing qualified immunity, all of the things that we've been talking about around police reform," Trivedi said. "Only after all of those things have been given a fair shot should we rely on criminal prosecution."

Without police reform, Chauvin's trial is "all that people had"

Gonzalez Van Cleve agrees that long prison terms generally do more harm than good. But in the absence of meaningful police reform, she said longer sentences for officers who break the law become "an important proxy."

"This is where the ambivalence lies. People of color, reformists, abolitionists, many of them would not want lengthy sentences for almost anybody," Gonzalez Van Cleve said. "However, how do we measure the worth of a life? How do we measure George Floyd's life? I think that these are the types of inherent contradictions that happen when the system has no structures to hold the most powerful people - law enforcement - accountable."

Katherin Hervey, a former Los Angeles public defender and director of the documentary The Prison Within, which examines a restorative justice program, said she saw people on social media calling for prison violence against Chauvin following his guilty verdict. She said people often have vengeance in mind when they talk about what constitutes "justice."

"The same people who are screaming for reform are simultaneously screaming for him to get raped in prison," she said.

"People do have a right to celebrate a guilty verdict. He should have gotten a guilty verdict and it should not be a surprise to us that this man received a guilty verdict," she added. "However, our calls for extremely hard sentencing are really just doing more violence and it's just going to continue the cycles of trauma and shoving everything under the rug."

Gonzalez Van Cleave argued the stakes for sentencing Chauvin, or prosecuting any officer accused of killing a civilian, would be much lower if there were structures in place to remove cops from the force after the first allegation of serious misconduct. In addition to Friday's sentencing, Chauvin is facing federal civil rights charges stemming from both Floyd's murder and the violent 2017 arrest of a 14-year-old boy.

"That's why people put so much passion into this trial," Gonzalez Van Cleave said of the lack of meaningful police reform. "It's all that people had."