Meet the Latinas Who Helped Secure the Guilty Verdict in the Trial of Derek Chauvin

Lola Velázquez-Aguilu had promised her son that she would not take on any more trial cases. But that changed when Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison asked her to serve as a special prosecutor in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who murdered George Floyd.

“Mom, you have to do this,” her 11-year-old son told her. She reminded him that he would call her upset about all the time trials consumed. “He said, ‘you know mom, I know, you’re right, but I’ll be okay.’

“It just punched me in the gut hard because I couldn’t get those words out of my head—the idea that he’ll be okay,” said Velázquez-Aguilu, who worries about her son’s future. “He’s going to be well over six feet tall. He’s going to be a big man, a man of color, and he’s shy and gentle. What if someone someday mistakes that? It just hit me. I felt like, how can I not do this? If he’s going to be okay, I have to do this.”

“[My son is] going to be a big man, a man of color, and he’s shy and gentle. What if someone someday mistakes that? It just hit me. I felt like, how can I not do this?”

The gravity of this case, its implications for black and brown sons and daughters, is also what compelled Zurizadai Balmakund-Santiago, who joined Ellison’s office a year ago, to let the attorney general know she wanted to help make sure there was accountability.

Ellison said he received more than 40 calls from lawyers interested in lending their expertise and time. Ultimately, Velázquez-Aguilu was recruited and Balmakund-Santiago was chosen to form part of the 14-member prosecution team that won a guilty verdict—on all counts—in the Chauvin case. On May 25th of 2020 in Minneapolis, Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, stealing the life out of him right on camera. Mass protests erupted not only across the nation but also in other parts of the world over police impunity, racism and white supremacy.

To mount a thorough prosecution, Ellison broke the team into subgroups that focused on different aspects of the case.

A former assistant U.S. attorney with more than eight years of prosecutions under her belt, and currently lead counsel at a medical device company, Velázquez-Aguilu brought her prowess to making dense and technical testimony accessible during the Chauvin trial. “You have to be able to educate at a level that everyone is going to understand and in a way that’s going to be informative and persuasive. That’s always the complexity around medical testimony,” Velázquez-Aguilu said.

“If you watched the testimony of Dr. Tobin, who was our lead medical expert, you saw the use of both video and graphics to help people understand how the respiratory system works,” she explained. “There were graphs and charts that helped people understand the impact on oxygen intake and lung volume as a result of positioning and compression.”

Velázquez-Aguilu identified, found and prepped medical witnesses like Tobin and wrote the outlines for direct examinations, work that Ellison called indispensable.

“Lola is brilliant,” the attorney general said. “She’s just really sharp. She has a strong dedication to community and she cares a lot about people.”

Ellison, who has known Velázquez-Aguilu for years, reached out to her when she chaired Minnesota’s Commission on Judicial Selection, from which she stepped down to focus on the trial. At the time, an African-American woman who had applied for a judgeship was being labeled as “intemperate” and lacking a judicial demeanor, according to Ellison. “Lola empathized with how women of color, black women in this case, are judged by different standards,” he said.

Balmakund-Santiago, who has nearly five years of trial experience that includes criminal, child protection and civil cases, worked primarily with prosecutor Steve Schleicher in identifying law enforcement witnesses, developing topic areas to cover and preparing those for trial.

Ellison said Balmakund-Santiago, an assistant attorney general, and her colleague Natasha Townes Robinson went through videos and stacks of documents to draft an extensive, minute-by-minute timeline of the events around the murder of Floyd. “That timeline was a critical piece of evidence to help us understand the case. She was meticulous.” He also noted the prep work she had ready in the event that Chauvin took the stand.

Balmakund-Santiago said that no one on the team took any aspect of the case for granted. “Every single part was important because it only takes one juror who doesn’t agree that we’ve met our burden of proof to change the course of history.”

While both Latinas pointed to the volume of video and game-changing testimony from law enforcement officers, witnesses and experts as critical to the outcome of the case, they also couldn’t emphasize enough the commitment to strong teamwork.

“I don’t take off my experience of living in Spanish Harlem, of living at various socioeconomic levels, of having brown brothers who have to live their lives in this world”

“There was no pride of ownership—everyone worked on this case as if belonged to all of us because it did,” said Balmakund-Santiago. “None of the work that we completed in teams ever went out without the full team knowing exactly what was going to happen. And that made us better lawyers and I think it made us better public servants.”

Velázquez-Aguilu said the higher quality performance of diverse teams was evident in how they worked. “You get all these different perspectives at the table, you give everybody equal voice and you’re going to kick the tires 18 different ways to get to the right result,” she said. “And that’s something that I felt in this team all the time.”

For years, Velázquez-Aguilu’s leadership and reputation have preceded her, to the point that she is now on the short list of candidates for U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota. Ellison said he wanted her to serve as a lead presenter in the trial. But given her day job, Velázquez-Aguilu’s time exclusively on the case could not be worked out.

A rising star in the legal community, Balmakund-Santiago, 32, recently served as president of the Hispanic Bar Association of Minnesota.

Balmakund-Santiago’s winding road to Minnesota began in Spanish Harlem, El Barrio, where she was raised. Her Puerto Rican and Indo-Caribbean family left New York when she was about eight and moved to Ohio, Florida, Puerto Rico and then the Midwest, always in search of better conditions and opportunities, a journey she doesn’t compartmentalize. “As a prosecutor, I don’t take off my Latina hat,” she said. “I don’t take off my experience of living in Spanish Harlem, of living at various socioeconomic levels, of having brown brothers who have to live their lives in this world.”

Also Boricua, but raised in Madison, Wisconsin, Velázquez-Aguilu’s mother was a social worker who became the first Latina police officer in that state. Her father was a social justice activist who, as a paralegal, offered services in the migrant community.

“My dad is from New York. When he was a kid, he was 14 years old, he was beaten severely by police. He was permanently injured as a result,” Velázquez-Aguilu, 41, said. “My whole life, I was aware of what’s possible on both ends of the spectrum.”

Law, she said, became a natural fit. “My parents drilled into me this idea of—you have a voice, you will speak up. You see something wrong, you speak up. To say I was empowered to do this would be an understatement because I was expected to.”

“I am not sure that the way Latino communities and Native communities experience law enforcement is as much part of the dialogue right now. It should be”

Giving more voice to the way people, including immigrants, are treated by police is urgent for Velázquez-Aguilu. “I am not sure that the way Latino communities and Native communities experience law enforcement is as much part of the dialogue right now. It should be.”

She talked specifically about the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and the same crisis of femicide for women at the southern border and also in Puerto Rico, expressing that a close examination of the intersection of law enforcement, race, gender and the medical community is needed.

“There has to be an evaluation of the medical examiner community and the role it is playing in what’s happening. That, to me, is a super important conversation that has to be had,” said Velázquez-Aguilu, adding that she is heartened by efforts such as a state task force in Minnesota to identify solutions and a new investigative unit introduced by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.

According to Ellison, both Velázquez-Aguilu and Balmakund-Santiago may continue their involvement in the Chauvin case. The former police officer is appealing his verdict and three other officers will go to trial for their roles in Floyd’s death—all as the one-year anniversary of Chauvin’s horrific act approaches.

On the inevitable discussion that will unfold next week about whether our nation is moving forward—since Floyd’s murder, bodycam videos have revealed more police shootings and violence—Balmakund-Santiago underscored the need for continued grassroots mobilization and legislation that would overhaul policing. “I think that’s much more powerful than what we can even bring into a courtroom,” she said. “If we can stop it at the head, so that we don’t move into a courtroom, we are doing the work correctly.”