Since Daunte Wright’s April death, Potter has insisted the incident was a mistake. On Thursday, the jury rejected her explanation.
Kim Potter, the white former Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, police officer who fatally shot Daunte Wright in April, has been convicted after appearing to mistake her handgun for a Taser during a deadly traffic stop.Potter, 49, was found guilty on Thursday of first-degree manslaughter and second-degree manslaughter in relation to the April 11 traffic stop that ended with the 20-year-old Black man’s death. The former officer, who resigned from the force after 26 years on the job, now faces 35 years behind bars.
The verdict, reached after 27 hours of deliberation over three days, is just the latest chapter in the ongoing American reckoning over police brutality. It also marked the first major trial for a Minneapolis-area cop who shot and killed a Black man since Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd. Both incidents prompted mass protests in a state critics say has not done nearly enough to overhaul de-escalation and use-of-force policies.
Throughout her week-long trial, prosecutors argued Potter was criminally negligent. But while testifying in her own defense on Friday, Potter emotionally recounted the events leading up to Wright’s death—and suggested the whole incident may not have even started if the officer she was training didn’t initiate the traffic stop.
“We were trying to keep him from driving away. It just went chaotic,” Potter said through tears. “I remember yelling ‘Taser! Taser! Taser!’ and nothing happened, and then [Officer Anthony Luckey] told me I shot him.”
But while Potter apologized for the incident and insisted she did not “want to hurt anybody,” Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Erin Eldridge stressed during closing arguments that “accidents can still be crimes.” Walking the 12-person jury through the evidence presented during the trial, he emphasized that Potter was not charged with murder because they do not believe the former cop purposefully killed Wright—just that she was criminally reckless.
“This was no little oopsie,” Eldridge said on Monday. “This was not putting the wrong date on a check. This was not entering the wrong password somewhere. This was a colossal screw-up. A blunder of epic proportions.”
To prove the first-degree manslaughter charges under Minnesota law, prosecutors had to convince jurors that Potter caused Wright’s death with “reckless handling or use of a firearm so as to endanger the safety of another with such force and violence that death or great bodily harm to any person was reasonably foreseeable.” For the second-degree charge, prosecutors had to convince jurors that Potter “caused an unreasonable risk” by using a firearm.
Potter’s defense team, however, insisted throughout the trial that Wright was resisting arrest and trying to break away from the officers—potentially meaning the use of force was warranted.
“Daunte Wright caused his own death, unfortunately,” Potter’s lawyer, Earl Gray, said during his closing arguments. “Those are the cold hard facts of the evidence.”
Gray told jurors on Monday that his client did not consciously commit any certain acts and that “a mistake is not a crime.”
His argument mirrored the testimony of Brooklyn Center Police Chief Tim Gannon, who resigned with Potter the day before she was arrested after publicly suggesting the incident was justified. On the stand, Gannon told jurors that he concluded there was “no violation… of police, procedure, law” after reviewing Potter’s body-camera footage.
Brooklyn Officer Anthony Luckey told jurors last week that he and Potter pulled Wright over for allegedly expired car tabs. After performing a records check, Luckey said, he discovered Wright had an outstanding gross misdemeanor warrant and asked him to step out of the car.
Body-cam footage shows Wright exiting his car and then jumping back inside before Luckey could handcuff him. Potter is then seen grabbing her handgun with her right hand before pointing it at Wright and yelling about the Taser.
About a second later, Potter fired a single shot at Wright’s left side. The criminal complaint against her states that Wright cried out in pain before his car sped off for a few blocks and eventually crashed into another car.
“Oh my God!” Potter is heard telling Luckey in body-cam footage played to jurors. “Holy shit! I just shot him!” In another clip played in court, Potter can be seen sobbing on the ground, insisting she didn’t know what she did.
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s office has said Wright died from the gunshot and that his death was a homicide. After the incident, a Minnesota Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator examined Potter’s duty belt and concluded that her handgun was holstered on the right side and her Taser on the left. Prosecutors argued to jurors that Potter knew that the gun was on her right-dominant side and her Taser on her left—and recklessly grabbed the wrong one during Wright’s arrest.
“Carrying a badge and a gun is not a license to kill,” Eldridge stressed to jurors.
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Original Article: Daunte Wright Killer, Former Brooklyn Center Minnesota Police Officer Kim Potter, Found Guilty (thedailybeast.com)
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Of course the growing number of Daunte Wrights out there could avoid this if they simply had the brains to utilize common sense and not do dumbass things like this guy did.
More black police officers increases the chances of black cops having to deal with the thousands and thousands of George Floyd’s and Daunte Wrights in America.
And when incidents like this happen and it’s a black cop involved, other blacks and the mostly white media will be okay with it.
LESSON HERE FOR WHITE PEOPLE ….. DON’T EVER GO INTO LAW ENFORCEMENT IN TODAY’S AMERICA.
BE A FIREMAN INSTEAD !!!!!!
She made a big mistake, she is not guilty. The tape shows her collapsing after it happened, she was destroyed. That jury was wrong.
Your comment is the only sensible one I have read. These criminals will not obey commands. He was escaping after he had been told to stop. If he had listened and obeyed he would be alive today. He caused his own demise. The officer is innocent and is taking the brunt of racism. It is wrong and unfair!
After convictions like this, will the State of Minnesota have any police officers in the future? I certainly wouldn’t put myself at such hazard in this state.
Even though Daunte was a career petty criminal, he had done nothing to get the death penalty. Just like with every demographic, there are bad apples that need to be culled. There are actually bad cops and people that should never be a cop. Who cares if Daunte had expired tags and a warrant, he would just be let back out by the DA anyway.
But the black guy who tried running over his girfriend in Wisconsin was on the run from the cops he then ran over elderly people and kids, killing 8 including two children in a holiday parade and they caught him but they let him out that night…welcome to the newest 3rd world corrupt evil government….get ready people this is going to get ugly.
I never relized how evil these black people are. Not all of them but I believe most of them are evil. I say if they hate their freedom here go back to Africa or any other worthless government 3rd world ran country!
Jasmin, obviously you’re one of the entitled! You want to talk evil! For hundreds of years, the white man has murdered Blacks without consequences. They even made it a family entertainment!! I didn’t come from Africa, my ancestors did. But your ancestors didn’t come from here either! So if you think that most Black people are evil,why don’t you go back to where your ancestors came from! Because it’s people like you who still thinks that it’s okay to kill Blacks without consequences. You act like some white people aren’t evil or don’t commit crimes. They are and they do! They’re just treated differently! So, if you don’t like it,go back to wherever your ancestors came from!