Tag Archives: Daunte Wright

Sentence causes heartburn

My first reaction to learning of the sentence given to a former Minneapolis police officer who shot a young man to death thinking she was firing a Taser at him, and not her pistol, was that she got off too lightly.

Former cop Kim Potter will serve two years in the slammer and on supervised probation in the shooting death of Daunte Wright.

Potter is a white woman; Wright was African American.

She got into a tussle with Wright during a stop. Wright started resisting arrest. Potter reached for her service pistol and shot Wright. She carried her Taser on the other side of her belt. The Taser is bright yellow; the pistol is black. They feel differently in the hand and they certainly look differently.

I was horrified when I first heard of the incident. How could a trained police officer make such a grievous error? How does one reach for one device thinking she was reaching for another one?

Potter deserved to spend the maximum amount of time after a jury convicted her of involuntary manslaughter. Then the thought occurred to me … finally! She didn’t intend to shoot Daunte Wright with her service weapon.

I am still wrestling with the correctness of the sentence. I guess I just am not as dumbstruck by the act as I was initially.

Potter is done with police work. Of that I am absolutely certain. It’s just as well, given the horrifying mistake she made in an incident that never should have ended as tragically as it did.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Jury rules correctly

Kim Potter messed up when she pulled her service revolver out of its holster and fired a shot into Daunte Wright, so a jury today ruled in a Minneapolis courtroom.

Potter is a former Minneapolis police officer who stood trial on two manslaughter counts in Wright’s death. The jury convicted her of first- and second-degree manslaughter. It was the correct verdict.

Understand that I was not at the scene when Potter killed Wright. I know what most of us know, which is that Potter said she thought she was reaching for her Taser but pulled out her pistol instead.

Police procedure tells me the Taser and the pistol are stored on opposite sides of the belt that officers wear. The Taser is a brightly colored device designed to stun a suspect … not kill him or her. The pistol is, well, a firearm on which cops are trained to use with proficiency.

I’m still scratching my head over how Potter could mistake one device for the other. Then again, I never have been involved in a life-and-death struggle, so I cannot judge whether Potter was thinking clearly when she shot Daunte Wright to death.

And of course, we have the racial element: Wright was African-American, Potter is white.

Accordingly, Minneapolis — which was torn asunder by the George Floyd murder while he was being arrested by local police — is likely to be spared the uprising one might expect had the jury gone the other way.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com