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New Day

Decision Expected on Charges for Officer Who Fatally Shot Daunte Wright; CDC Advisory Panel Holds Emergency Meeting Today on J&J Vaccine. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired April 14, 2021 - 07:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[07:00:00]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: And it's going to be a patchwork. So it will be very interesting to see how different places handle this.

Andy Scholes, thanks so much for being with us.

New Day continues right now.

All right, welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is New Day. I'm John Berman. Poppy Harlow here with me all week. Great to have you here.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN NEW DAY: Great to be here.

BERMAN: So this is what we're watching this morning. Criminal charges could be filed against the Minnesota Police officer who shot and killed Daunte Wright. 26-year veteran Officer Kim Potter has resigned from the Brooklyn Center Police Department along with the police chief. A county prosecutor expects to announce this charging decision in the coming hours. This could happen very quickly.

Hundreds of people gathered last night for a third night of protests.

HARLOW: There was also a very emotional and touching moment. You're watching it right now. This is Daunte Wright's parents meeting the family of George Floyd who actually left the courtroom to console the Wright family. Floyd's death was also marked in Tuesday's protests with demonstrators kneeling for nine minutes and 29 seconds in his honor.

The murder trial of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin will continue this morning. Defense attorneys opened their case yesterday with the use-of-force expert who testified that Chauvin's restraint techniques were justified, in his opinion. He also testified that Floyd was, in his view, not compliant. We'll talk about all of that ahead with our experts.

But let's start this hour with our Adrienne Broaddus. She joins us in Brooklyn Center, Minneapolis, with our top story. Good morning, Adrienne.

ADRIENNE BROADDUS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Poppy, good morning to you. As you all mentioned, this case is moving fast. Days after Daunte Wright was shot and killed, we could hear a charging decision for the officer who is responsible. That's according to the prosecuting attorney in Washington County.

Now, for those of you at home watching and listening, I want to give you a point of reference. This is Hennepin County. Washington County is another jurisdiction. About a year ago, a new policy was implemented. Whenever there's a case involving excessive or deadly force, the prosecuting attorney in that jurisdiction doesn't handle the case to avoid a conflict of interest.

Nonetheless, the officer who spent 26 years on the force here, Kim Potter, submitted her resignation letter to the city yesterday. But the mayor told me he hasn't accepted her resignation. And folks here in the city took over the streets. You can see the trash littering the road behind me. They took over the streets to express their opinions. They want justice and they want Potter criminally charged.

The protesters and members of the family can't unsee what they saw. Listen in.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NAISHA WRIGHT, DAUNTE WRIGHT'S AUNT: My nephew was 20. Did you all not see my little great nephew? Did you not all see that beautiful baby? He's fatherless, not of a mistake, of murder. That's murder. Say his name.

CROWD: Daunte Wright.

WRIGHT: Say his name.

CROWD: Daunte Wright.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROADDUS: And, John, you can hear her pain. She can't unsee what she saw in that video and so many people who gathered here overnight said the same thing. They can't unsee what they saw. And they see not only with their eye but their heart as they stand up for justice. John?

BERMAN: All right. Adrienne Broaddus for us in Minnesota, Adrienne, thank you so much for your reporting.

Joining us now is CNN Political Commentator and Criminal Defense Attorney Bakari Sellers. Also with us, CNN Law Enforcement Analyst Charles Ramsey, he led police departments in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Bakari, we have word from the lawyers in charge of perhaps prosecuting this that we could get word on charges as early as today. How is this going to work in terms of how these charges will be presented, and what do you think we're likely to see?

BAKARI SELLERS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: The first thing that will happen is the family will usually be informed of -- the victim is usually informed of what the charging decision is. In this cause, you really have two choices, either an involuntary manslaughter charge or a third-degree murder charge.

[07:05:03]

The difference being the involuntary manslaughter charge to give view and listeners an example, and sorry for this analogy, but it's a heat- of-passion charge. It's the best example that they give you in criminal law school is when you come home and your wife is cheating on you and you shoot everybody in the house. In the heat of passion, that would be an involuntary manslaughter.

As soon as you take a break, as soon as you think about it, as soon as you develop that malice aforethought, that moves into murder.

So what you're going to see in this is that she made a decision in the heat of passion, in the heat of the moment, which caused the death of another, which is your involuntary manslaughter.

The third-degree charge, of course, is a depraved mind. It's similar to happened in the George Floyd case with Derek Chauvin showing that the behavior was reckless and they have to prove that that intent that she had a depraved mind, something because she was apologizing a crime they may not be able to prove.

HARLOW: So, involuntary manslaughter comes with up to ten years in prison in the state of Minnesota. It is also what the officer in the killing of Oscar Grant in 2009 in Oakland, California, was ultimately convicted of.

Charles Ramsey, to you, the question that Bakari laid out so well, is depraved mind or heat of the moment? And we saw the moment. The word saw the moments on that video, taser, taser, taser. We see the weapon in front of her. She sees the weapon for a matter of seconds before it's fired. What does that leave you thinking as we wait for charges?

CHARLES RAMSEY, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, I mean, she sees the weapon but she's also focused the individual. I don't think the shooting was intentional, but the man is still dead, and so there's negligence there, if nothing else. And so I think there is room for some form of charge in there, but I'm not a lawyer so I don't know specifically what that would be.

But I think when you listen to the video, you will hear her shout, taser, you hear her reaction after she fires the shot. I think it would be very difficult to prove intent.

But, again, it shouldn't have happened. She's a 26-year veteran. You can't afford to have those kinds of mishaps when it comes to use of force. You simply can't. I mean, a person has lost his life. You can never get that back. A family is suffering because of your negligence as a police officer, and that certainly is something that cannot be overlooked.

BERMAN: And, again, we should note this within a few hours, so we'll be able to talk with much more authority about what the charges are and the implications there.

If I can, I want to turn focus to the Derek Chauvin trial yesterday because there really was a stunning moment and that's Defense Witness Barry Brodd, a use-of-force expert who testified about two things. I want to play an extended clip here. And what people need to pay attention to is he's saying two things here which are remarkable in light of the video evidence and in light of the other testimony that we've heard.

He's saying that George Floyd was non-compliant when he was in the prone position on the pavement and he was saying that putting him in that position doesn't constitute a use of force. So listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEVE SCHLEICHER, PROSECUTING ATTORNEY: What part of this is non- compliant?

BARRY BRODD, USE-OF-FORCE EXPERT: So I his arm position and a picture that's posted that a person would have both hands in the small of their back and he's been resting comfortably versus he's still moving around.

SCHLEICHER: Did you say, resting comfortably?

BRODD: Or lying comfortably.

SCHLEICHER: Resting comfortably on the pavement?

BRODD: Yes.

SCHLEICHER: At this point in time when he's attempting to breathe by shoving his shoulder into the pavement?

BRODD: Describing what the signs of a perfectly compliant person would be.

SCHLEICHER: So attempting to breathe while restrained is being slightly non-compliant?

BRODD: No.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: I want to get two things here, if I can. First to Chief Ramsey, just on the facts of what he said, the idea that George Floyd on the ground was noncompliant, the idea that it wasn't a use of force. Based on your decades of experience, is what he's saying close to the truth?

RAMSEY: No, it's not. And, I mean, you can look at the video and see that. I don't know Mr. Brodd. I've never met him. But I've met people that have a similar mind-set, let's say. And I don't know exactly what's on his mind, let me make that clear, but I have come across people that will go out of their way to try to justify anything that a police officer does, and this is not justifiable, period. And I think probably if the defense had it to do other again, they may have thought about a different expert witness to come in and testify because he didn't appear to even be well prepared in terms of being able to present testimony.

I thought the prosecution really pretty much ripped it to shreds on cross-examination, but, again, I think those statements like resting comfortably on the pavement, the man died. I mean what does that do to your credibility as a witness in the eyes of a jury? I mean, I just don't get it.

[07:10:01]

I really don't understand the strategy.

BERMAN: So, Bakari, what does the jury see there? I mean, they had so many witnesses testifying the opposite from the prosecution and then you have this one guy saying day is night and night is day. What's the impact on the jury?

SELLERS: Well, I agree with Chief Ramsey here. This expert witness wasn't very good. He may be an expert as deemed by the credentials needed to testify in court, but he just sucked. And I think that the criminal defense attorney is going to suffer because of how bad that expert witness was.

There are people who go out of their, who have been backwards to justify everything law enforcement does. There's even a larger swath of people, and we're seeing that in the case right down the street who will say that if he would have complied, things would be different and they take the light off of the officer's actions.

And this expert witness, I'm not sure, was good for even getting those people on your side, but the caveat, John, like anything else we say, and I know people get tired of me saying it, is that it only takes one juror. So we shall see. But I don't think this expert witness was effective in even getting that one juror.

HARLOW: Commissioner Ramsey, I want to take a step back because, again, this is happening in the middle of the Chauvin trial, and it's another black man killed at the hands of police in and around Minneapolis in less than a year. I mean, George Floyd was killed near the end of May.

And when you look at the makeup of the Brooklyn Center Police Department, it suffers from what the Minneapolis Police Department did, and that's a real lack of diversity or representation of the city. They have four black police officers in a force of 47 in a city that is about 30 percent African-American. Can you speak to this broad issue here of a total lack of representation?

RAMSEY: Well, diversity is a problem. I mean, there's no question about that. But I think it points to a much larger issue, if I may, just for a moment. The conviction of Derek Chauvin, should that occur, or the officer in the Wright case or whatever, is not going to really fix the problem facing us as far as policing in America is concerned right now. The problems are systemic in nature and have to be addressed that way.

We do have problems with hiring in our business, use of force training. These things need national standard set. I think the president made a mistake by not taking the lead on this, saying that Congress ought to do it. Our Congress is incapable of doing much of anything right now.

This is going to require presidential leadership in order to look at to police, but the entire criminal system -- police is a good place to start, but it shouldn't end there. The entire system needs to be review and serious recommendations and implementation of those recommendations need to occur. But we're going to be having those conversations over and over again.

BERMAN: Charles Ramsey and Bakari Sellers, our thanks to both of you this morning.

RAMSEY: Thank you.

BERMAN: All right. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine put on hold across the United States. Dr. Anthony Fauci weighed in on vaccine hesitancy moments ago. Where is this all going over the next, really, days, next.

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[07:15:00]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: But there is a concern about hesitancy out there. The fact that this was done would, in my mind, underscore and confirm how seriously we take safety. Even though it's a very rare event, so if anybody is going to doubt that they may not be taking safety very seriously, I think this is an affirmation that safety is a primary consideration when it comes to the FDA and CDC. That's why it was done, and that's why it's a pause. It isn't a cancellation. It's a pause.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: That was Dr. Anthony Fauci a few minutes ago right here on New Day reinforcing the safety or coronavirus vaccines despite the rare blood clots that did lead to the U.S. suspension of the use right now of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The CDC advisory panel will hold an emergency meeting on the vaccine today.

With us, our Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Also with us again today, Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, also a member of the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, who was involved in the emergency use authorization for the J&J vaccine. Good morning to you both.

And, Sanjay, let me begin with you. Now that we're 24 hours from getting this news, you were with us as it broke yesterday morning, what are your top line thoughts for Americans, especially after hearing Dr. Fauci answer all of John's important questions?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the top line is that this is a very rare event that we're talking about here, you know? I think we're talking about something that's less than one in a million. But it's also a serious type of blood clot. I think people are sort of saying, blood clots, I've heard of that. This is one of those, is that big a deal? This is a different type of blood clot.

I think we have an image here I can just show you quickly. It's a blood clot that occurs in some of the veins called sinuses in the brain. So, blood goes to the brain. Blood needs to leave the brain. And if you get a bleed clot, as you see there in red, the blood can have a hard time leaving and that can cause brain swelling and headache and blurred vision, even seizures, can be a serious problem. So not all blood clots are the same, and I think that that's what sort of prompted this investigation.

This is an area of the body that I deal with. And I can tell you, it's tough sometimes to treat these clots because what happens is you're developing a blood clot but at the same time you don't have enough platelets, which cause blood clots. So you have two almost counteropposing forces at the same time, and sometimes people can treat that inappropriately and make the problem worst.

So I think when Dr. Fauci said, hey, we wanted to make sure we sent a message to clinicians out there, you see this, ask about, hey, have you gotten a vaccine recently, and if so, maybe have this type of treatment pattern, I think, is important.

[07:20:04]

But I hope this pause doesn't last for very long.

BERMAN: Dr. Offit, you were with us yesterday analyzing this as it was breaking, digesting it. And you said yesterday, as you were looking at the very limited data that you're seeing that this looks real. This is like a real thing worth looking into. 24 hours later with Dr. Fauci saying he thinks days, a week or so, weeks in terms of a decision on where to go from here, where do you think this is headed?

DR. PAUL OFFIT, MEMBER, FDA VACCINE ADVISORY COMMITTEE: I think today is critical. When the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices at the CDC considers what's going on, they're going to vote at the end of the day about that. And I think they're going to make likely one of two conditions.

Either one, they'll say, I think that we need to be transparent about the fact that this is a very, very rare problem associated with J&J's vaccine and anybody who gets this vaccine needs to be fully informed about that. Or they may say that, as has been done in some European countries, that we will restrict this vaccine's moving forward to people of a certain age or gender, because this is primarily a phenomenon that occurs primarily in younger women. I really don't think that they're going to withdraw the vaccine. I think that would be a mistake. The only way out of this is an important component of this, but as Dr. Gupta said, this is a serious problem and I think it really is a real problem. We're seeing it in a similar way with the U.K. AstraZeneca vaccine, which is a similar platform, this replication of adenovirus, but I do think it is real, but it is extremely rare.

HARLOW: Sanjay, the headlines have been about women between the ages of 18 and 48 because that is the six who have been impacted so far. But people might not remember, but you know well what happened in the fall. And that is that you had J&J pausing because of a blood clot in a young man.

GUPTA: That's right. So this is -- you may remember, this was last fall, and the J&J trial paused at that point, initially was sort of described as an unexplained illness. We didn't have a lot of details. But what we did learned is it was a blood clot that occurred in those same sorts of veins in the brain, and it was a 25-year-old male.

So, they, at that point, said, look, this doesn't seem to be associated, the trial continued. I think that's one thing that they may be looking at it as well to say, hey, look, are there other cases out there? There may be other cases out there, people who went to their doctor, they had this problem, but they didn't put it together with the vaccine. Now, you know, you have an opportunity for people to sort of look through the records and say, we've had these types of things.

Again, I think it's rare. I don't want to suggest that there's going to be a ton of people like this out there, but there may be others out there as well. Are there men? Are there some sort of common denominators, you know, between all these people who have sort of developed this sort of problem?

And another thing I'll just show you, if you can put this graphic up, just the likelihood, again, just to demonstrate how rare this is, one in a million, we talked about, with regard to developing these sorts of blood clots. It was one person who died out of the six. Just the risk of death in that same age group, we went back and looked at that same age group, 18 to 49-year-olds, the risk of death if you get COVID-19, 1,800, roughly, out of a million cases.

I just think it's important when you talk about, look, this is rare, what does that mean? Well, this is how much more of a problem it is if you get COVID and because you weren't vaccinated. So, still, I hope the message ends up being very clear here to go ahead and get the vaccine.

BERMAN: And, Dr. Offit, it's been a no-win situation for the scientists involved here. You're seeing criticism from people saying, oh, they shouldn't have done this, it's so rare, it's going to make people more hesitant. And then sometimes, practically, the same people are saying, see, we told you so, these vaccines are dangerous.

OFFIT: No. Dr. Fauci's clip earlier that you played was right. I mean, in a rational world, people would look at this and say, look, the FDA and CDC really cares about safety, so much so that they're completely transparent about extremely rare risks, therefore, I can feel comfortable about the other vaccines that they don't cause that and I can feel comfortable with this vaccine and that it's a very, very rare phenomenon. But we don't live in that world. I mean, we don't live necessarily in a rational world.

And I think when people hear that there's a problem, I think it doesn't matter whether they hear it's one in ten or one in a hundred or one in a million or one in a billion. I think what they hear is, this could happen to me. In New York State, when they sell lottery tickets, where you have roughly a 14 million to 1 chance of winning, sell it by with a similar phrase, this could happen to you. And I think that's what worries me.

This will extend -- this will make people more concerned about getting vaccines and they may choose not to get them, and vaccines are our only way out of this pandemic, so we need to explain what's going on, as Dr. Gupta said earlier, so that people can understand it. And I'm worried that people will be -- could have free-floating anxiety about this and this will make them even more hesitant about getting vaccines.

[07:25:00]

BERMAN: Dr. Paul Offit, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, we thank you both for being with us, both yesterday and today, trying to understand this as they move forward. Thank you.

HARLOW: All right. Let's take a moment this morning to remember some of the more than 563,000 Americans lost to coronavirus.

Reverend David Atkinson was the senior pastor at the United Methodist Church in Collierville, Tennessee. Colleagues say he was about 6'5 but knew how to speak to people and build trust. Atkinson leaves behind a wife and three grown sons.

48-year-old Ali Thomas was a beloved figure in the North Texas fencing community. He grew up in Egypt, fenced for the national team, then emigrated to the United States, become a fencing instructor. He had been training the Egyptian decathlon (ph) team for the Tokyo Olympics, and he leaves behind three daughters and a legacy, the youngest two of his daughters also fence.

92-year-old Philomena Rose Scalia worked in the Baltimore State Attorney's Office for two decades. She retired in her mid-80s. She was a legendary home cook. Her daughter says she was kind, listened to people's stories, and then came back with a gift of meat balls. She is survived by two daughters, two sons, and 20 of their children and grandchildren.

We'll be right back.

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