Jury begins deliberating officer’s case in Daunte Wright death

MINNEAPOLIS » The suburban Minneapolis police officer who says she meant to use her Taser instead of her gun when she shot and killed Black motorist Daunte Wright made a “blunder of epic proportions” and did not have “a license to kill,” a prosecutor told jurors on Monday shortly before they began deliberations in her manslaughter trial.

Kim Potter’s attorney Earl Gray, though, countered during closing arguments that the former Brooklyn Center officer made an honest mistake by pulling her handgun instead of her Taser, and that shooting Wright wasn’t a crime.

“In the walk of life, nobody’s perfect. Everybody makes mistakes,” Gray said. “My gosh, a mistake is not a crime. It just isn’t in our freedom-loving country.”

The jury began deliberating shortly before 1 p.m.

Prosecutor Erin Eldridge said during her summation that Wright’s death was “entirely preventable. Totally avoidable.”

“She drew a deadly weapon,” Eldridge said. “She aimed it. She pointed it at Daunte Wright’s chest, and she fired.”

Gray argued that Wright “caused the whole incident” because he tried to flee from police during a traffic stop.

“Daunte Wright caused his own death, unfortunately,” he said.

Potter mistakenly grabbed her gun instead of her Taser because the traffic stop “was chaos,” Gray said.

The jury was set to deliberate once closing arguments concluded.

Potter, 49, told jurors on Friday that she “didn’t want to hurt anybody,” saying during her sometimes tearful testimony that she shouted a warning about using her Taser on Wright after she saw fear in a fellow officer’s face. She said she was “sorry it happened” and that she doesn’t remember what she said or everything that happened after the shooting, as much of her memory of those moments “is missing.”

Eldridge said Monday that the case wasn’t about whether Potter was sorry.

“Of course she feels bad about what she did. … But that has no place in your deliberations,” she said.

Playing Potter’s body-camera video frame by frame, Eldridge sought to raise doubts about Potter’s testimony that she fired after seeing a look of fear on the face of another officer who was leaning into the car’s passenger-side door and trying to handcuff Wright. The defense argued that he was at risk of being dragged.

“Playing the video not at the right speed where it showed chaos, playing it as slow as possible … that’s the rabbit hole of misdirection,” Gray said.

As prosecutors have done throughout the three-week trial, Eldridge stressed that Potter, who resigned from the police force two days after the shooting, was a “highly trained” and “highly experienced” 26-year veteran and said she acted recklessly when she killed Wright.

“She made a series of bad choices that led to her shooting and killing Daunte Wright,” Eldridge said. “This was no little oopsie. This was not putting the wrong date on a check . ... This was a colossal screw-up. A blunder of epic proportions.”