of care. we trust they will use their authority reasonably and this was a particularly egregious abuse of that force. again, parra phrasing the court s findings. the typical second-degree murder does not include, does not involve that extent of abuse. of a dearly held position of abuse position of authority and trust by the community and by individuals of the community. your honor found that mr. floyd was treated by by mr. chauvin with particular cruelty.
the call of duty. i want to thank them for doing that on behalf of the whole prosecution staff. i want to thank the family, the loved ones, friends of george floyd. they have been through so much more than families involved in murder cases. he s right. it is a fraternity you don t want to be part of. but they ve been through so much more because of the pandemic and because of security, safety precaution that s we ve had to take. they have been through a lot. at a time when they try to grieve like everybody does the loss of someone, they are going through so much more. and i want to thank them, all of them, the family had, the court saw testimony the family.
they re trying to deal with loss but in a public way and under very trying circumstances through no fault of their own. so i thank them. they have all been models of grace and understanding. and it s really remarkable, quite frankly. i think i ll come back to them, again, in a little bit. had your honor, we have a sentencing brief. i want to incorporate that. i guess i would incorporate my comments today into that memo. but i think there are things that i want to bring out today in my arguments. for hundreds of years, the court had discretion in sentencing. it was the trial court s decision. what a sentence should be. the recognition that the trial court sat through a trial, watched the evidence. and saw how it affected people.
informed of the court s discretion. the legislature passed the guidelines, legitimate attempt to try to even out sentences, they defined a certain presumptive sentence as we all know for typical crimes. but they did not remove discretion for judges. they recognized that nobody is better suited to decide whether this is the typical case represented by the guidelines presumptive sentence or reasons why this is worse than that. and it gave the guideline still gives this court discretion when there are aggravating factors. to give a more serious sentence than the guidelines presumption calls for. we re asking you to do that today. as this court found, there are four aggravating factors that we
have identified that go beyond a list of just what those factors are. we have not just done our found work and found a list. court made good findings, detailed findings about those factors and we think that justify a greatly increased sentence. this is not the typical second degree unintentional murder. the supreme court in our state said that and very recently even one aggravating factor is sufficient to go twice the top of the range. here we have four. the first one that the court found is an abuse of position of trust and authority. when mr. chauvin was acting as a police officer, he had the trust and authority. that s true. we trust police officers. we trust them when we need help. we call them when we need help.