Former police officer Kimberly Potter, 49, was sentenced to two years in prison in the United States this Friday (18) for the murder of Daunte Wright, a black man killed at age 20 during a police approach in April last year. The sentence, lighter than the seven-year sentence sought by prosecutors in the case, will be served two-thirds in prison and the remainder on probation.
Potter claims to have confused a taser, a stun gun used to immobilize fleeing people, with his firearm during the approach carried out at Brooklyn Center, in the state of Minnesota. She resigned from her post two days after the incident, which sparked major protests in the region, and has been in prison since a jury found her guilty of two counts of manslaughter in December.
Daunte Wright was approached by Potter and another agent while driving because he had an air freshener hanging from his car’s rearview mirror, which is prohibited by local law. Officers found the man had an outstanding warrant for his arrest and attempted to arrest him, when Wright resisted and tried to free himself from the agents.
Potter, a white woman, then shot the young man, as can be seen in the scenes recorded by the camera attached to the police officer’s uniform. Wright even drove a few kilometers, until he crashed his car into another vehicle and died at the scene. Judge Regina Chu of Hennepin County, who handed down the sentence, described Potter as “a police officer who had made a tragic mistake”.
The magistrate said the police officer was forced to make a split-second decision during a “chaotic and tense” approach and that the evidence presented at the trial justifies the use of a taser to protect another police officer who was at the scene and trying to get into the car. to contain Wright. She added, however, that the man was killed due to Potter’s recklessness, who confused the weapons.
Wright’s mother, who spoke with her son during the police approach, by phone, criticized the sentence, which she described as lenient. “Kimberly Potter murdered my son on April 11 [de 2021]and today the justice system murdered him again,” Katie Wright told reporters after the sentencing hearing. “Tears of a white woman managed to override justice.”
Prosecutors asked for a prison term of 86 months, or seven years and two months, following state guidelines on manslaughter crimes. Former police officer Potter, who has not appealed the conviction and has given no indication that she intends to appeal the sentence, said before the sentence was announced that she was sorry she had hurt Wright’s family. “My heart is broken and devastated.”
The former agent’s defense asked the judge to consider that Wright had resisted arrest, labeling him an aggressor, and said Potter felt remorse for the unintentional crime. Lawyers also mentioned her lack of criminal record during the 26 years she was a police officer, adding that she would have a low risk of recidivism in the criminal system, not least because she is no longer with the police.
Wright’s death sparked several nights of protests at Brooklyn Center. The murder took place amid the trial process of Derek Chauvin, a former police officer who killed George Floyd by asphyxiation. The location of the police approach was also just 20 kilometers from where Floyd was killed, which boosted the wave of acts against police violence and structural racism in the US.
Judge Chu said the actions of former agent Potter cannot be compared to those of Chauvin, who pressed Floyd’s neck with his knee for more than nine minutes until he stopped breathing. He was subsequently sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison.
It is unusual for police officers to be convicted and sentenced in the US in cases involving deaths during police stops, especially when officers claim they have mistaken their tasers for a firearm. A survey by the American newspaper The New York Times shows that, in 15 cases in the last two decades in which police officers said they had mixed up the weapons, only three were convicted of a crime, including two that killed the victims.
