March 18, 2021
In the forecast, clear skies tonight with lows in the 20s. Temperatures in the upper 40s to mid-50s Friday, with highs in the 50s this weekend. Find more from Updraft. Twelve jurors have now been seated in the trial of Derek Chauvin — the former Minneapolis police officer is charged in the killing of George Floyd. The pace of jury selection picked up today, after pre-trial publicity slowed the process earlier this week. Judge Peter Cahill replaced two jurors who said they couldn’t be impartial after hearing that the city of Minneapolis is paying the Floyd family $27 million to settle a lawsuit.
On Thursday, the judge seated a white woman in her 50s after she promised not to let her expertise as a nurse supplant any testimony about Floyd’s cause of death. Cahill is expected to decide Friday on defense motions to delay the trial and move it out of town, and whether to admit evidence from Floyd's May 2019 arrest — a year before he died in custody.
Cahill has also given attorneys in the trial more chances to eliminate potential jurors. The judge is allowing Chauvin's attorneys to have three extra strikes — and the prosecution 1 additional strike — during jury selection. Prosecutors used one of their strikes today against a white woman in her 40s who said she had strong respect for law enforcement and strongly opposed Black Lives Matter, although she said her opposition was to the organization, not to the idea that the lives of Black people have value. Two alternate jurors still need to be selected before opening statements may begin March 29th. In COVID news, case counts and hospitalizations are starting to slowly rise again, while the pace of vaccinations has flattened. The state health department reports about 36,000 more vaccinations on Thursday. That’s about what the daily count has been for the past two weeks. But that pace was enough for Minnesota to reach a new milestone Thursday. Gov. Tim Walz announced the state has now administered more than 2 million vaccine doses. It took the state more than two months to administer the first million doses, but less than a month to administer the second million.
Minnesota also reached another more sobering COVID-19 milestone today. Cases have now topped a half million. Thursday’s data shows an additional 93 hundred cases, marking a week straight with active counts about 8 thousand, a stretch not seen since late January.
You can get more of the latest news, in just a few minutes, via the Minnesota Today podcast. — Dan Kraker | MPR News | 
