ABC's Sunny Hostin Breaks Down in Tears After Derek Chauvin Verdict: 'This Is What Justice Finally Looks Like'

Dave Nemetz
·2 min read
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The View co-host Sunny Hostin didn’t hold her emotions back in a powerful speech reacting to the guilty verdict handed down on Tuesday in the Derek Chauvin trial.

Appearing on ABC News’ coverage of the verdict as the network’s senior legal correspondent, Hostin noted that “I’ve been a lawyer for 27 years” before recalling being in law school in 1992 when the Rodney King verdict came in, with all four LAPD officers being acquitted. “I believed my eyes then, so I believed my eyes this time with George Floyd.” As a lawyer, she knew that a quickly reached verdict meant a likely conviction, but “because it is so rare that police officers are convicted, because Black men and Black boys are killed by police with impunity in this country” and “because I am the mother of an 18-year-old boy who is now in South Africa, and I feel that he is safer in South Africa than he is in his own country, I am so relieved that this is what justice finally looks like for my community.”

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Through tears, she added that “while I know that this does not bring George Floyd back to his family… at least I believe now that the movement that we’ve seen since his murder on video for the world to see is not just a moment. I really believe that this is a movement that we’ve seen. And for that, I am so, so very thankful that perhaps we will see real change, much-needed change, in this country.”

Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, was found guilty on all three counts in the murder of George Floyd last May, a case that sparked nationwide protests and a revitalization of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Watch Hostin’s reaction in full below:

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