Ex-cop on trial
Faces slay rap in shooting of Minn. driver
Kim Potter, a Minneapolis-area ex-cop who fatally shot a Black man during a traffic stop, then is heard on a bodycam saying she’d mistakenly grabbed her gun, goes on trial this week.
Jury selection is set to start Tuesday at a Hennepin County courthouse.
The 26-year veteran of the Brooklyn Center, Minn., police force is accused of shooting Daunte Wright last April 11. The 48-year-old officer, who had pulled him over during a routine traffic stop, was arresting him on an outstanding warrant for a misdemeanor weapons charge when Wright jumped back into his car and drove away.
Potter shot him, the car crashed, and 20-year-old Wright died at the scene.
The incident grabbed national headlines last spring and led to protests in Brooklyn Center — about 10 miles from the Minneapolis courtroom where former police office Derek Chauvin was being tried in the death of George Floyd.
Potter, who resigned two days after the shooting, claimed she thought she had grabbed her Taser. She can be heard saying on bodycam video, “I grabbed the wrong [expletive] gun.” She later adds: “I’m going to go to prison.”
Wright’s family does not buy Potter’s “accidental gun discharge” claim.
“I lost my son,” his father, Aubrey Wright, told “Good Morning America” last April. “He’s never coming back. I can’t accept that — a mistake? That doesn’t even sound right.”
Prosecutors allege Potter committed first-degree manslaughter by causing Wright’s death while committing a misdemeanor crime. A separate second-degree manslaughter count alleges she acted with culpable negligence.
If convicted, Potter faces up to 25 years in prison.
The jury’s task will be to determine whether Potter’s actions were reckless or culpable negligence.
Defense attorneys are also trying to argue Wright caused his own death by fleeing a traffic stop, and that an officer — there were three involved in the stop — could have been dragged to his death if Potter hadn’t stepped in.
Potential jurors will be queried about their attitudes toward the protests that occurred in Minneapolis after Floyd was killed, The Associated Press said.
They have received questionnaires asking about their views on those and other protests over the past two years.
They were also asked whether they participated, had been injured or suffered property damage, or knew anyone who had.
The jury is to remain anonymous.
The first-degree manslaughter charge requires prosecutors to prove that Potter caused Wright’s death during the course of committing a misdemeanor, the “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,” Minnesota law states, as cited by the AP.
In the second-degree manslaughter charge, Potter would have had to cause Wright’s death “by her culpable negligence” by consciously taking the chance of causing death or grave bodily harm with the firearm, the AP said.
Prosecutors don’t need to prove that Potter was intending to kill Wright.
The trial timeline for Potter sets aside at least six days for jury selection.
Wright’s killing was the third high-profile shooting of a Black man during a police encounter in the Minneapolis area in the past five years.
Philando Castile was killed in Falcon Heights in 2016 and George Floyd in Minneapolis last May.