Tara McKelvey
BBC News, Minneapolis

Millions of people have seen the video of Georg Floyd's death, observing how Derek Chauvin placed a knee against his neck during his arrest.

It is the most important piece of evidence in the trial.

Here in Minneapolis, a few blocks from the courtroom, Alewanea Bey, a personal care assistant, tells me that watching the images was harrowing:

“When I looked at him, I saw hatred in his eyes,” she says, referring to Chauvin, as she saw him in the video.

She describes how he observed those who were nearby, while he was pinning Floyd to the ground: “It’s like he was taunting: ‘I dare you to come.‘”

Prosecutors showed the video in the courtroom, focusing jurors’ attention on Chauvin.

Defence attorneys are steering their attention to other issues, such as Floyd’s physical condition at the time.

Image source, Court TV

The next state's witness, Donald Williams III, has been called to the stand.

Williams works in private security and says he's also a 33-year-old entrepreneur - and a father.

He says he's lived in Minneapolis his whole life. He goes on to talk about private security work he has done and the fact that he understands a bit about use of force through his hobby as a wrestler and through his security work.

Eric Nelson, the lawyer for Chauvin tried to get Oyler to describe the crowd that grew around the scene of Floyd's arrest.

In his opening argument, Chauvin's lawyer claimed that the angry onlookers, caused "the officers to divert their attention from the care of Mr Floyd."

Oyler says she cannot recall how quickly the crowd gathered, but by her memory, it was not until Floyd was removed from the police squad car and placed on the ground.

After a few more short exchanges, the defence ends questioning.

Image source, EPA

Today, the court heard the testimony of Alisha Oyler, a witness who filmed several videos of Floyd’s arrest.

But she wasn’t the only witness to capture footage that day.

Last year, we spoke to the lawyer of Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old girl who recorded a widely shared video of the arrest.

Frazier was taking her nine-year-old cousin to Cup Foods, a shop near her home in Minneapolis, when she saw Floyd tussling with police.

For ten minutes and nine seconds she filmed until the officers and Floyd left the scene; the former on foot, the latter on a stretcher.

At that point, Frazier could never have imagined the chain of events that her video would set into motion. At the click of a button, the teen played a role in spurring wave after wave of protests.

"She felt she had to document it," Frazier's lawyer Seth Cobin told BBC. "It's like the civil rights movement was reborn in a whole new way, because of that video."

Read more: The personal cost of filming police brutality

We're back from break, and Chauvin's defence attorney is now questioning Oyler about what she witnessed during Floyd's arrest.

"You did not film the entire encounter," asks defence lawyer Eric Nelson.

Oyler responds that she didn't.

Nelson says that's not surprising, given that she was working, "in part at least".

Tara McKelvey
BBC News, Minneapolis

Activists on the street say defence lawyers are shifting the blame from Chauvin to Floyd during this trial.

They say that by talking about Floyd’s heart trouble and drug use, lawyers are trying to make it seem as though he brought on his own death, and that Chauvin was not responsible.

“They say it was the drugs and opioids,” William Shaw, 58, who used to pour cement at construction sites, tells me, standing a few blocks from the courthouse.

He described how the defence lawyers changed the focus of the trial, from the defendant to the victim.

“They want us to think he is on trial,” says Shaw, referring to Floyd. “But I know that Chauvin is on trial.”

Shaw says he made a cardboard sign, “I am George Floyd”, because he wanted to show his support for him, on the day of the lawyers’ opening statements.

Image source, Reuters

Covid-19 has made social distancing our new normal - and it’s affecting the trial too.

Four officers were involved in arrest that ended in the death of Floyd. The initial plan was to try them all together.

But Judge Cahill - the man overseeing the trial - ruled that the pandemic had made separate trials necessary.

"The physical limitations of courtroom C-1856, the largest courtroom in the Hennepin County Government Center, make it impossible to comply with Covid-19 physical restrictions in a joint trial," he wrote in a January ruling.

Prosecutors, who had called for the trial to be delayed until the end of the pandemic, pushed back on that decision.

They argued two separate trials could “retraumatise eyewitnesses and family members” and risked “prejudicing subsequent jury pools”.

But the ruling ensures that Chauvin is the only defendant at this current trial, while his former colleagues - Tou Thao, J Alexander Keung and Thomas Lane - will not go on trial until at least late August.

Read more: What we know about the officers

The judge has just called for a 20 minute break.

The defence team will get a chance to cross-examine Oyler after the break.

"Did you ever observe the officers getting up, off of George Floyd?" the prosecutor asks.

"I don't think so. I don't know," says Oyler, who filmed the arrest from across the street.

After an ambulance arrived to take Floyd away, she said onlookers appeared shocked. She says she did not realise what she had seen at the time, but "now obviously we know why" bystanders reacted that way, she says.

When asked by prosecutors why Oyler was filming Floyd's arrest, here's what she said.

"Because I always say the police are always messing with people.

"And it's wrong and it's not right."

Oyler says that she could not hear what was happening through the windows of the Speedway.

When asked when a crowd of onlookers began to form, she appeared uncertain and said, "I'm trying to remember".

She said she doesn't think the bystanders began to notice what was happening until after Floyd was taken out of the squad car. A recording she took from that day, with her exclamations of surprise is also played.

During the examination of Alisha Oyler, who worked at the convenience store across the street from where Floyd was arrested, she has been asked to point out several key locations.

With a photo and stylus, she was first asked to circle the building where she worked. Then to circle the cash register area, where she was working at the time of Floyd's arrest.

She says that where she was standing, she could see the site where the police were "messing with somebody".

We're now watching the contemporaneous video feed from the camera outside the Speedway.

Image source, Court TV

Cameras feature heavily in this trial. There is the surveillance footage, being played now, that captured Floyd's arrest. There was the footage that captured his death, and now in the courtroom, three discrete cameras have been set up to broadcast proceedings to the world.

The courtroom broadcast of the trial is of special interest - while not unusual in the US, that kind of transparency raises long-debated issues about the role of cameras in courtrooms.

There are two sides to this debate: the freedom of the press and the right to a fair trial.

“For me this is about ensuring public confidence in the system,” Jane Kirtley, a professor of media law, said. “It couldn’t be more important in a high-profile, controversial case like this one.”

But concerns have been raised about the safety of jurors, the intimidation of witnesses, and the sensationalisation of the case by the media.

Paul Thaler, the author of two books about cameras in courtrooms, said it would be “naive” to assume “the massive publicity will have no impact on the case”.

Read more about how the role of the camera is coming into focus in this trial.

Image source, Court TV

The second witness, Alisha Oyler, is being questioned by prosecutors on what she saw on the day of George Floyd's arrest.

The 23-year-old says she saw the police "messing with somebody" from the grocery store she worked at across the street.

Responding to a question from prosecutors, Oyler clarifies she saw officers "disturbing somebody". That person, she says, was George Floyd.

Visibly nervous, Oyler struggles to remember several details.

"I don't remember, I can't think right now," she says at one point.

Lawyers for the state of Minnesota have called Alisha Oyler to the stand. She is the second witness of the day and saw Floyd's arrest unfold.

"I'm sorry. I don't like this," she says after courtroom staff ask her to speak into the microphone.

The prosecutors start by asking the 23-year-old about how she moved from her native Arizona to Minneapolis and her work in the city.

She describes how she worked for about a year as a "shift lead" at a Speedway convenience store, but is unemployed now.

The building is across the street from the Cup Foods, where police were called on George Floyd after he was accused of paying for cigarettes with counterfeit money.

She began her shift around 15:00 on the day that Floyd died, she says, adding that she can see the Cup Foods across the street from the cash register.

Police dispatcher Jena Scurry has just left the stand.

Earlier, she testified that she called Derek Chauvin's sergeant after she watched him detain George Floyd from a nearby surveillance camera.

"My instinct were telling me that something wasn't right," Scurry said - adding that Floyd was pinned down so long she thought that the camera was frozen.

When questioning Scurry, the defence attorney seemed to challenge her impression that something was wrong with Floyd's arrest.

"It's fair to say your attention wasn't necessarily focused," the lawyer says - noting that Scurry was working as she kept track of Floyd's arrest.

Later, the lawyer posits that Scurry could not be familiar with the police department's use of force policies. "You're not a police officer," he says.

Before Scurry steps down, the prosecutor returns to emphasise that what she saw that day was "rare".

Scurry agrees.

Image source, Getty Images

Some officers expressed anger over the backlash against police after Floyd’s death.

Faced with calls to defund or disband police departments, some felt all officers were being unfairly tarred with the same brush.

A viral video that circulated last year showed members of a police union, the New York Benevolent Association, venting at perceived mistreatment of officers amid the protests.

"Stop treating us like 'animals' and 'thugs'," Mike O'Meara, head of the union, tells reporters in the video.

"I am not Derek Chauvin. They are not him," he says.

"Everybody's trying to shame us. The legislators. The press. Everybody's trying to shame us into being embarrassed of our profession," he says. "We've been left out of the conversation. We've been vilified. It's disgusting."

Read more

Image source, Getty Images

Two lengths of time could become important pieces of information in the trial - and one of them has already become a symbolic part of the Floyd story.

The first is eight minutes and 46 seconds. That's the time protesters have associated with Floyd's death, and it comes from the Hennepin County Attorney's initial complaint against former officer Chauvin.

Outside the courtroom this morning, protesters knelt for 8:46 in observance of Floyd's passing.

The other time in nine minutes and 29 seconds. That timing comes from a pre-trial submission from the prosecution.

Police body camera footage of that timing suggests the actual time Floyd spent under Chauvin's neck was over nine minutes- nearly a minute longer than the initial complaint.

As we saw from opening statements, the prosecution will focus on how long Derek Chauvin had his knee on the neck of George Floyd.

Expect prosecutors to bring up that timeframe in much of their questioning.

Image source, EPA

While the court has been in session, the White House has said that the case is one President Joe Biden "will be watching closely, as Americans across the country will be watching”.

“He will certainly be provided updates,” the White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

As a presidential hopeful in 2020, Biden said he would make racial justice reforms a goal of his presidency.

Now in office, he has signed executive orders aimed at delivering on that promise, including in access to housing and treatment in prisons.

Speaking to reporters today, Psaki said Floyd's death and the subsequent protests “certainly impacted how [the president has] thought about his own government, making equity central to what we do”.