‘Gentle Steering of the Ship’: How Keith Ellison Led the Prosecution of Chauvin

Years before he won a murder conviction for the death of George Floyd, Mr. Ellison, the Minnesota attorney general, was a young civil rights lawyer taking on police misconduct.

MINNEAPOLIS — As a young civil rights lawyer almost 20 years ago, Keith Ellison took on a client who accused two Minneapolis police officers of sodomizing him with a toilet plunger. The case had echoes of an earlier police brutality case in New York, in which four officers were sent to prison in connection with the sexual assault of Abner Louima, who was attacked with a broken broom handle in a precinct bathroom. The officers in the case involving Mr. Ellison’s client, Stephen Porter, were ultimately cleared by an F.B.I. investigation. But Mr. Ellison achieved a very different outcome on Tuesday regarding another Black man’s encounter with the police, when Derek Chauvin, the white former officer charged with killing George Floyd, was convicted of two counts of murder as well as manslaughter.