A former Omaha attorney is part of the prosecution team in the high-profile trial of a former Minneapolis police officer charged with murder and manslaughter in George Floyd’s death.

Erin Eldridge, a former federal prosecutor who joined the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office in 2018, questioned two of the youngest witnesses as part of the prosecution of Derek Chauvin.

Floyd, who was Black, was declared dead on May 25 after Chauvin, who is white, pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for about nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and pleading that he couldn’t breathe.

Days after Floyd’s death, Minnesota’s governor announced that Attorney General Keith Ellison would take the lead prosecuting the case. This was a win for local civil rights advocates who said longtime Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman didn’t have the trust of the Black community.

Ellison, the state’s first African American elected attorney general, previously served in Congress and worked as a defense attorney. He was a frequent presence in the courtroom during jury selection, though he did not question jurors. His team also includes Matthew Frank, an experienced attorney who recently won a guilty plea in the case of Lois Riess, who got life in prison without parole for killing her husband in 2018. Riess became notorious after she fled Minnesota, killed a woman in Florida, and assumed her identity before she was captured.

Also on the prosecuting team are Jerry Blackwell, who last year won a posthumous pardon for a Black man wrongly convicted of rape before the infamous Duluth lynchings of 1920, and Steven Schleicher, a former federal prosecutor who led the prosecution of the man who in 1989 kidnapped and killed Jacob Wetterling, whose death helped inspire a 1994 federal law requiring states to establish sex offender registries.

Ten more are working behind the scenes, many for free.

Eldridge had previously served as a special assistant U.S. attorney in Nebraska and the Northern District of Iowa.

Jonathan Simon, a professor at University of California Berkeley School of Law, noted that our culture associates women with “being more caretaking toward children, toward juveniles.”

Using Eldridge as the questioner for two younger witnesses may have helped to “ease the witnesses’ experience and get their testimony as effectively as possible, but also to help the jury see this in the most sympathetic light,” Simon said.

Joseph Daly, emeritus professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, said Eldridge “was particularly adept at showing empathy and kindness and a certain softness, which I think is really important when you’re questioning children.”

When an 18-year-old witness, Alyssa Funari, began to cry, Eldridge told her to take her time and offered a tissue. “Is this difficult for you to talk about?” Eldridge asked. “Do you need a minute?”

Chauvin ‘s attorney, Eric Nelson, has been working alone. He has been aided in court by a legal assistant who is also an attorney but who hasn’t taken part in the courtroom arguments.

Nelson, is among several attorneys in Minnesota who often represent police officers. One of his bigger cases involved Amy Senser, the wife of former Minnesota Vikings tight end Joe Senser, who was convicted in the 2011 hit-and-run death of a Minneapolis chef. Nelson argued Senser should be sentenced to probation; a judge gave her 41 months in prison.

Nelson also has tried murder cases. He helped win an acquittal for a Minnesota man who was charged with fatally shooting his unarmed neighbor in 2017. He also won an acquittal for a Wisconsin man who testified that he feared for his safety when he fatally stabbed a man who confronted him in 2015.

Chauvin’s trial is among the most significant court cases in recent history, and it is clear the state will spare no expense. That point was driven home by Ellison as soon as he took over, when he vowed to “bring to bear all the resources necessary to achieve justice in this case.”

Conversely, the defense is funded through the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association’s legal defense fund. The MPPOA is a police advocacy organization made up of local police unions from across the state. Though he was fired after Floyd’s death, Chauvin earned the right to representation through his years as a member of his local union.

MPPOA works with a group of 12 defense attorneys who take turns handling cases. Originally, Chauvin’s defense was assigned to attorney Tom Kelly, but Kelly retired, and Nelson replaced him.

Daily Record Managing Editor Scott Stewart contributed to this report, which was compiled from several AP dispatches. Find the AP’s full coverage of the trial at apnews.com/hub/death-of-george-floyd.