The George Floyd Mural at 311 Indian Canyon Drive in Palm Springs. The mural has been defaced with graffiti.
© Paul Albani-Burgio/The Desert Sun / USA TODAY NETWORK
(Minneapolis, MN) – A former Minneapolis Police officer who received the shortest sentence for the 2020 murder of George Floyd has been released from federal prison. Thomas Lane was released today after finishing his state and federal sentences. Lane was convicted by a federal jury in 2022 of violating Floyd’s civil rights for not responding to his medical needs during the nine-plus minutes a fellow officer was kneeling on Floyd’s neck. Lane will still have to serve a year of probation, while two other former officers that were involved, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao, will be released next year.
The former Minneapolis police officer convicted of killing George Floyd is now in Texas. On Tuesday (August 20th), Derek Chauvin was relocated from a transfer facility in Oklahoma to a minimum-security federal prison in Big Spring, Texas. There is no word as to why the move took place. The change comes the same day that fellow former Minneapolis police officer Thomas Lane, who was also convicted in the Floyd case, was released from prison.
George Perry Floyd Jr. was an 46-year old African American man who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd might have used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, on May 25, 2020. George Floyd’s death sparked the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
