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Former Minneapolis police officer Thomas Lane has accepted a deal in the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, appearing in Hennepin County Court Wednesday morning to plead guilt to aiding and abetting second second degree manslaughter.
KARE reported that the deal will require Lane, one of three former officers charged with aiding and abetting Floyd’s death under the knee of Derek Chauvin, to serve three years in federal prison, concurrently with a federal sentence that has yet to be revealed.
Lane, Tou Thao, and J. Alexander Kueng were convicted in February of violating Floyd’s civil rights by not stopping Chauvin — who was convicted on state charges of second-degree unintentional murder, third degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter and pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges — when he knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes.
Lane will be officially sentenced after the federal sentences are announced.
The state trial for the three was scheduled to begin June 13 and will now start with only Thao and Kueng, who were in the courtroom on Wednesday when Lane entered his guilty plea.
Chauvin has been sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison on the state charges. Earlier this month, a federal judge accepted a plea deal on the civil rights charges that calls for prosecutors to seek a 25-year sentence instead of the maximum life in prison, as CrimeOnline previously reported. When that sentence is formally announced, it will be served concurrently with Chauvin’s state sentence. Chauvin’s attorneys have appealed the state conviction.
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[Featured image: L-R, Thomas Lane, J Alexander Kueng, Tuo Thao/Hennepin County Jail]
