Jury in ex-officer’s trial resumes deliberations
MINNEAPOLIS – A jury resumed deliberations Tuesday in the trial of the former 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.
The jury met for about five hours Monday and resumed deliberating for a second day on Tuesday morning. The jury is being sequestered during deliberations.
The jury got the case after closing arguments in which prosecutors accused Kim Potter of a “blunder of epic proportions” in Wright’s death in an April 11 traffic stop – but said a mistake was no defense.
Potter’s attorneys countered that Wright, who was attempting to get away from officers as they sought to handcuff him for an outstanding warrant on a weapons charge, “caused the whole incident.”
Potter, who is white, is charged with first- and second-degree manslaughter.
If convicted of the most serious charge, Potter, 49, would face a sentence of about seven years under state guidelines, though prosecutors have said they will seek more.
The mostly white jury got the case after about a week and a half of testimony about an arrest that went awry, setting off angry protests in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, just as nearby Minneapolis was on edge over Derek Chauvin’s trial in George Floyd’s death. Potter resigned two days after Wright’s death.
Prosecutor Erin Eldridge called Wright’s death “entirely preventable. Totally avoidable.” She urged the jury not to excuse it as a mistake: “Accidents can still be crimes if they occur as a result of reckless or culpable negligence.”
“She drew a deadly weapon,” Eldridge said. “She aimed it. She pointed it at Daunte Wright’s chest, and she fired.”
Potter’s attorney Earl Gray argued
that Wright was to blame for trying to flee from police. Potter mistakenly grabbed her gun instead of her Taser because the traffic stop “was chaos,” he said.
“Daunte Wright caused his own death, unfortunately,” he said. He also argued 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.”
Potter testified Friday that she “didn’t want to hurt anybody” and that she was “sorry it happened.”
Eldridge said 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 “fear” on the face of another officer, then-sgt. Mychal Johnson, who was leaning into the car’s passenger-side door and trying to handcuff Wright.
The defense has argued that Johnson was at risk of being dragged and that Potter would have been justified in using deadly force.