Jury finds Kim Potter guilty on all counts in “Taser taser taser” trial
My first thought on reading about this verdict was I guess Minnesotans don’t want to have any police officers left. Because I don’t understand why any person would run the risk of becoming a police officer in such an anti-officer environment – and that’s not just based on this case.
Here’s more:
COUNT I – Charge: First-Degree Manslaughter Predicated on Reckless Use/Handling of a Firearm GUILTY
COUNT II – Charge: Second-Degree Manslaughter GUILTYJudge orders Potter taken into custody without bail. Attorneys ask for argument on the issue. Not a danger to public, has made all court appointments, it’s Christmas season, will seek dispositional departure due to clear remorse. Ask that she not be incarcerated until sentencing. Deep roots in community, not a flight risk.
Prosecution asked she be taken into custody immediately. Customary to take into custody upon conviction for this level of crime. Potter not living in state, aggravating factor. Will be seeking Blakely sentencing enhancement.
Judge: Presumptive sentences immense, will require she be taken into custody without bail. Can’t treat this case differently than any other case.
The maximum penalty is 15 years, but as already stated, the prosecution will be asking seeking “sentencing enhancement.”
From the comments to the Legal Insurrection post:
The difficulty for the jury is the obvious fact that the law is not really clear. The jury instructions don’t help much but that is not really the fault of the judge. Some situations come down to the judgment of the jury on who they think was at fault in the incident. It is hard to see how a law could be written that would decide this question for the jury.
Personally, I would vote to acquit. It is hard for me to see how police can protect the public, let alone themselves, if they are not given some leeway in reacting to suspects who flee arrest.
…In the absence of knowledge of [Duante] Wright’s [very lengthy criminal] record, it was prudent to require that he not be allowed to escape. The state’s use of force expert was terribly naive and taken to its logical conclusion by law enforcement, civic order would collapse.
But isn’t that sort of the point? That civic order should collapse? As long as the Kim Potters of the world – a police officer who clearly made an error in a situation of tremendous pressure – are sentenced to the maximum, what else matters?
Potter could have been acquitted of criminal charges and remained civilly liable. That obviously hasn’t happened.
ADDENDUM: I think the racial aspects mattered as well. If Potter had been black or Wright white, I doubt she would have been charged at all, and I doubt that if she had been charged she would have been found guilty.
This was a terrible decision (in a case involving a terrible mistake) from a terrible jury (no doubt fearful of reaching the “wrong” verdict and eager for a long peaceful Christmas weekend without civic unrest or threats of retaliation against the “racist” jurors) with a terrible judge presiding! Ann Coulter has posted (at Townhall.com) a fine piece about the long criminal history of Wright (who would not have died had he not resisted arrest), while Alan Dershowitz has described the case as “the racist prosecution of a white woman” by the “thuggish” Keith Ellison, whose allegiance is not to justice or to the rule of law, but to BLM and to hard-left activism.
I saw a criminal defense lawyer on FOX argue quite persuasively that the jury instructions would focus on culpable negligence and that this was a civil and not criminal matter. Then I saw two other lawyers on MSNBC who said she should be convicted. But they never even mentioned the jury instructions.
I’d like to see the jury instructions, but I’d say it was civil negligence and not criminal negligence.
The woman prosecutor worked on the Floyd case. For a time, she prosecuted crimes on Nebraska’s Indian reservations. She’s really moved up in the legal world, but I think she is just a terrible person. I’ve seen her on TV and I don’t like her one bit. How’s that for legal analysis?
This strikes me more as a judgment call than the Arbery or Floyd cases, whose resolution was ghastly. The prosecutor sounds like a vicious creature, however. Our judiciary seems to oscillate between collusion with prosecutors and appalling negligence. Is there anything lawyers do well?
The states use of force witness seems to be pretty anti-police. He basically said that she should not even have pulled the taser if she had done so. They should just have let him go and they could have picked him up later.
Of course the warrant they were arresting him on was a failure to appear warrant and while there was not evidence in the trial to say the Kim Potter knew this he had a history of evading and resisting.
He also had an restraining order of some kind filled by a female and there was an unidentified female in the car.
But hey don’t use force. If they resist let them go. That’s going to work well over time.
Over time? It’s working out that way already, and has been for the past 2 years. 2 Congresswomen were carjacked at gunpoint in the last day, in Chicago and Philadelphia, respectively. Both cities with Soros-financed prosecution reformists. And M-SP, in their ‘Minnesota Nice’ liberalism, are already reaping the fruit.
I can’t help but wonder why anyone would wear a police uniform in Minnesota. There are plenty of places, warmer places, where they would be welcome to serve.
Maybe they will figure that out.
May the judge, prosecutor and every member of that jury reap the appropriate consequence for that decision.
Clearly the majority of Minnesotans don’t want to have any police officers left and in time, they’re going to get their wish. Every sane adult left in Minnesota should be planning to leave and every cop should start looking for employment in another State like Florida.
Stupid is, as stupid does…
There’s also no doubt that the hard left wants civil order to collapse. They need it to, so that they can declare martial law… temporarily of course, only until the national emergency is over.
And how can someone be charged with two different Manslaughter charges for a single death? At most, it should have been one or the other.
I second Jon Baker’s question: How can there be two guilty verdicts for one death … when both verdicts were specifically **for the death** (i.e. one wasn’t for the death and the other for something that might have been associated with the death, e.g. armed robbery)?
Same with Chauvin: 2nd-degree murder, 3rd-degree murder, and manslaughter — as a matter of logic, there’s seemingly no logic in it.
And, yes, I think it should have been “not guilty” on all five counts in the two cases.
Neo has some (much?) legal education. I’m hoping she can weigh in on the seeming illogic that both Jon Baker and I are tearing our hair over (well, anyway, I am …).
I haven’t watched it yet but Nate is usually pretty good at explaining this stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UDCTx455Gc
Courtesy of CNN I just learned that Wright’s favorite number was 23 per his mother. 23?
Who has favorite numbers?
She will soon be very, very rich and will move to FL because it has no income tax.
Ben Crump is representing the family in the civil case. Millions!
Cornhead,
Wright’s Estate, by which I guess they mean his mother and any money she gets, is being sued by three of Wright’s alleged victims.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/daunte-wright-estate-third-lawsuit-gunpoint-choking-woman-robbery
Horrible. I hope an appeal overturns this.
Who has favorite numbers?
People who play the lottery or bet the horses.
I “third” jon baker and Paul Nachman’s question. In Florida, the State files one charge per offense allegedly committed — the “highest”/worst charge they think they can prove — and tries to prove that charge at trial. However, the verdict form (which the judge and attorneys hash out in advance) lists “lesser included” offenses in a sort of Russian-doll format. The judge reads the standard instructions for each level of offense on the verdict form. The jury must find the defendant guilty of one offense per actual crime charged; the jury is supposed to check Guilty for the highest/worst offense that the State proved beyond a reasonable doubt, or Not Guilty if appropriate. But the jury may not check off two levels of offense for a given charge.
I guess MN does it differently; presumably, the defendant can be sentenced for only one offense, to avoid double jeopardy.
I think I asked the same thing on powerline after the Chauvin verdict but don’t recall getting a final answer.
23 – Lebron James’ and Michael Jordan’s uniform number. I’d bet 23 is popular amongst African Americans.
Wright’s mother apparently thought it was karma that the verdict was on the 23rd.
Minnesota deserves all that it gets. But it really is a crying shame. Liberalism has wrecked MN.
“How can there be two guilty verdicts for one death … when both verdicts were specifically **for the death**”?
When the rule of law is abandoned, the ‘law’ becomes whatever the ‘authorities’ say it is, which can even vary from moment to moment.
Facts being “unfair” and logic and reason “the tools of white oppression”.
As a Texas National Guardsman, I was attached to a Minnesota Infantry Battalion in Kosovo for months. I kept in touch with some of them thru Facebook, which I am no longer on. I feel bad for them.
I’m a bit torn as women shouldn’t be doing front line (*) policing and there should be some negative consequences for making an egregious ‘mistake’ and pulling the wrong weapon.
* Keep a few on tap for cavity searches, playing ‘good cop’, dealing with bereaved, etc.
Zero sympathy for the ‘victim’.
All that said, it’s time for White jurors to refuse to convict in trials like this. Blacks have been doing so since forever when the tables are reversed. Can go back to some kind of Platonic Perfection after the coming civil war.
On a side note, this morning as I was pulling into the McDonalds drive thru to get breakfast, there was a couple of 60ish year old men, one black, one white, standing near a parked vehicle praying. I do not know what they were praying about. It saddens me that this whole leftwing “ wokeness” is driving a greater wedge between whites and blacks. Some people may think that the young white people that are “ woke” are moving closer to black people, but I surmise that eventually many of them will tire of putting career black criminals on a pedestal and almost certainly, the many of the very young whites who are being blamed for what happened in the past, will turn into the worst racist ever out of bitterness. Not to mention, the enabling of black criminality will start to turn asians and hispanics against blacks, in many cases. I think the “13 %” are being set up by white leftist for a very bad fall, in the long run.
Liberalism has wrecked MN.
No, Minnesota’s garbage political class has wrecked Minnesota. The voting public in Minnesota sat on their hands and let them do it.
Voters should start demanding that DA’s and judges who release repeat offenders be charged with negligent homicide when those offenders kill someone.
I know, I am dreaming, but if that was continuously put out for leftwing DAs to hear, maybe it might have some effect psychologically.
I honestly haven’t paid enough attention to the Potter trial to know what to make of the verdict, but how many fatal medical mistakes by doctors and nurses would qualify as manslaughter by this standard?
Minnesota is going to be an interesting test of the power of inertia. The Twin Cities is this mega-population center that exists in an otherwise low population state for historical and economic reasons that probably no longer apply. There are literally a million more people in the Twin Cities than all of the rest of the state. And while Minnesota has some beautiful land, most of the state is also an icebox for at least 1/4th of the year. There’s a good reason there’s a whole lot of nothing north of the Twin Cities.
Mike
This is sad – I do think she is guilty of being negligent; but, I wouldn’t find her criminally negligent. Perhaps, she just shouldn’t be a cop.
I haven’t followed this case as closely as Rittenhouse; but, I did see the video of her yelling taser, taser, taser, and then immediately realizing – to her own horror – that she just shot someone.
That is something she will have to live with the rest of her life. And, really, in this case I think that is more than enough “punishment.”
I agree Neo, that if her and the criminal’s race had been different there wouldn’t have been a trial – let alone a guilty verdict.
While many good people will not go into law enforcement; a good many already there will pull back from doing something that could lead them to being charged for a “crime” while just trying to do there job.
Law enforcement officers are doing a job to protect the public, however, their first duty is to themselves and their families which means they deserve to go home safely at the end of their day.
Is Zaphod some sort of troll trying to bring out the worst in people?
You find only the best people living under my bridge!
Sadly, we’ve cycled around Back to Blood, Old Chap. Wasn’t *me* who shoved the Overton Window so far to the Left that this is all that remains now. Who dunnit then? I’m totally stumped. Any ideas?
FWIW a realistic assessment of the Worst in People is how you build a society where nobody gets genocided once in a little while. It’s the idealistic nonsense and forcible imposition false virtues which leads to the pits. Counterintuitively, Intolerance Saves Lives.
What Zaphod said. The problem with Progs is they really do believe in the perfectibility of men. So they construct beautiful systems made of candy floss and sentimental aspiration. Which the hard men exploit.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Zaphod trying to bring out the worst in people?
Well he certainly is providing an example. But that’s just my assessment.
But not his country, so consequences are ours not his. Xi approves.
Off topic. Roy how is FL treating you? Do you miss life in The Gorge, not so breezy?
“…a police officer who clearly made an error in a situation of tremendous pressure…”
There’s a very reasonable argument to be made for indicting the police department’s management, specifically, the department chief, for what happened because this is exactly what a training failure looks like.
“Police Training” – almost everywhere severely inadequate – is supposed to provide officers with the necessary skills, and confidence, to manage these kinds of high stress situations. It’s called “stress inoculation” and is performed by ramping up stress levels during training to get the officer used to operating calmly and cooly under extremely hgh stress. It also needs periodic reinforcement, quite a bit more frequently than the “annual firearms re-qualification” most agencies follow, or the “40-hour block training” sessions agencies use.
Real training, and reinforcng that training, takes time and costs big money but it can deliver personnel to whom a severe crisis situation becomes a fairly routine issue to be competently handled. That almost no police agencies seek to create that level of proficiency among its personnel means things like this will occur periodically. we can choose to either live with it and sacrifice one or two at a time those upon whom we are expected to depend (the Left’s perpetual and frequent advocacy to “call 911” instead of owning a gun and learning and developing one’s own self-preservation and self-protection skills comes to mind) means we will be facing a steadily declining police presence in our societies, exacerbated by Soros-installed pro-crime prosecutorial teams.
It doesn’t get mentioned much – yet – but awareness is increasing that We’re On Our Own, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. That such a condition quickly leads to very unhealthy, and very risky, societies should come as no surprise.
While I am sympathic to her, I saw this coming. She had been on the police force for 26 years and mistakenly used her gun instead of taser, how does that happen?
The police should be looked at with suspicion, they are the cutting edge of Big Government and hold enormous power. That power needs to be checked tightly. We saw (FBI) what law enforcement can do when not checked. Ask Carter Page and General Flynn. The poor woman was negligent but 15 years seems to tad much. The poor officer in Floyd case, now that is a complete injustice.
Another Ben Crump special.
This woman should never again work as a police officer, but first degree manslaughter and 15+ years is nuts.
I have to wonder what the heck is going on with policing in Minnesota, though. Philando Castile, Justine Damond, George Floyd, this incident . . . a significant percentage of the nationally known police misconduct cases have come out of the twin cities.
Also, neo, the Damond/Noor incident is a data point against the notion that this prosecution was entirely or mostly about race. That case was also in Minneapolis, except that the races of the cop and decedent were reversed. The cop was convicted of murder 2, if I recall, but the conviction was reversed on appeal.
Ben Crump – the illegitimate spawn of Sapphire and J. Algonquin Calhoun.
Minneapolis is very sick. Why would any sane, rational person ever go there?
The people are horrible. They vote for and applaud vile, vicious government leaders. They commit horrific abuses of the law and the Constitution.
Evil is embraced and celebrated there. Stay safe. Avoid it at all costs.
Bauxite, got your causation backward. You know about incidents in MN because they take negligence or less and hype it into murder. The worst actors aren’t the cops. They are the prosecutors and elected officials.
Philando Castile, Justine Damond, George Floyd, this incident . . . a significant percentage of the nationally known police misconduct cases have come out of the twin cities.
Pretty much a function of the rotten political culture of the Twin Cities, which dominates provincial Minnesota. Note, Chauvin was prosecuted by Keith Ellison, a man who had no business in the Attorney-General’s chair put there by a feckless electorate. He is neither a skilled lawyer nor a decent human being. No fair-minded prosecutor would have secured an indictment of Chauvin or any of the other officers.
Justine Damond was shot dead by a rookie officer who was an explicit affirmative-action hire and special project of Mayor Betsy Hodges. The other rookie officer with him had to be put under oath in front of a grand jury before he would offer anything but gibberish to investigators and the state agency charged with investigating dragged his feet. Then a concatenation of prosecutor and judge secured a conviction on charges which were internally contradictory and could not survive an appeal. The Damond case was by 1,000 miles the most egregious case of police misconduct of them all, and the responsible party is out on the street consequent to the work of Minnesota’s political class.
The Castile case wasn’t as egregious as the Damond case, but it was the work of an emotionally neuralgic officer who should have received penalties he did not. Not useful for the narrative because the officer in question is hispanic.
Every sane adult left in Minnesota should be planning to leave and every cop should start looking for employment in another State like Florida.
Cut the state up. Put the seven counties around Minneapolis under one government and the rest under another.
Art Deco – On the narrow issue of whether Noor should have been criminally liable for his actions, I’d say the matter is very similar to the Potter case. Both officers made terrible errors that resulted in death. Noor took a completely unjustified shot when there was actually no threat at all. Potter mistook her gun for a taser. I think I could agree that what Noor did was worse, but I’m not sure how you can really say that one mistake was significantly more egregious than the other.
Re: Ellison – prosecuting attorney positions should be for boring, by-the-book lawyers. Electing or appointing ideologues and radicals to those positions is incredibly destructive to the legal system, even if they are ideologues are on “your side.” I think that’s what MN voters (and voters in many other jurisdictions) are learning the hard way.
I’d say the matter is very similar to the Potter case. Both officers made terrible errors that resulted in death. Noor took a completely unjustified shot when there was actually no threat at all. Potter mistook her gun for a taser. I think I could agree that what Noor did was worse, but I’m not sure how you can really say that one mistake was significantly more egregious than the other.
One of them had an accident and killed someone being detained with sufficient cause. The other quite deliberately killed someone for no reason whatsoever. That his behavior was baffling does not exculpate him.
I think that’s what MN voters (and voters in many other jurisdictions) are learning the hard way.
They didn’t need to learn the hard way. When he was elected, Ellison hadn’t practiced law in 16 years. He spent the largest slice of his career working for a legal services NGO and was otherwise an associate in firms owned by others. Most of his experience was in criminal defense law and much of the rest in ‘civil rights’ lawfare. He was a perfectly meh below-the-median attorney when he was a working lawyer. (You could say he was one ratchet higher than Letitia James, who put in 10 years as a legal aid lawyer before leaving the profession in 1999; Ellison only required one pass at the bar exam; in re James, between the time she finished law school and the time she was admitted to the New York bar, the examination was administered at least 3x).
Note, the whole Ellison saga implicates a mess of parties – the Minnesota electorate, the influentials in the state party, the donors, the street level mechanics. Every one of these parties should have told Ellison he was unsuitable for the position of Attorney-General.
She had been on the police force for 26 years and mistakenly used her gun instead of taser, how does that happen?
She worked on a small suburban force (47 officers, 11 f/t civilians, 10 p/t civilians). The suburb is kind of sketchy so the police have more confrontations than they would in an ordinary suburb, but it’s much less troublesome than a core city force. She’s female and not young, so it’s possible her work assignments tended not to include the most challenging details.
We saw (FBI) what law enforcement can do when not checked. Ask Carter Page and General Flynn.
1. You’re confusing federal investigators with local cops. Local cops are attempting to deter and investigate real crimes. They don’t invest much manpower in the employ of agents provacateurs. They record their interviews with suspects.
2. See Tom McKenna on the federal criminal code. The sentencing schedule is oddly calibrated, so that the sentences are abnormally severe compared to comparable state crimes.
3. There are a mess of three-felonies-a-day pseudo-crimes in the federal code, as well as enterprising prosecutors looking to nail innocent people. What Gen. Flynn was charged with is a ‘crime’ which does not exist in New York law, to take one example.
4. The known institutional culture of the FBI is rancid.
Recall the FBI is the one federal police service without a specific book of business. Recall that other federal police services have a remit that is constitutionally-sanctioned and can not be readily devolved. They may be doing their jobs poorly, but there is no doubt the job they’re doing is apposite for federal jurisdiction. The exceptions are the DEA and the FBI, and the DEA could be made kosher by restricting its operation to inter-state and international traffic in contraband.
The federal penal code needs to be scarified and needs to have its sentencing schedule recalibrated. The FBI should be broken up and subject to mass dismissals.
Art Deco @ 10:09: Sheer music. Thanks.
(But I would have spelled it “agents provocateurs”). 😉
I have seen quite a number of videos of traffic stops where the officers were killed or injured, and the criminal drove away free as a bird. Sickening, and a reminder that the police are in mortal danger from encounters with perpetrators at all times.
When will the law begin to recognize that arresting officers, who are attempting to arrest a suspect, are justified in using whatever force is necessary to effect the arrest, and/or protect themselves from harm? When will the legislatures/governors/city councils/mayors proclaim in public that suspects who resist arrest are putting themselves in danger of being injured or killed? Police are given the job of arresting the criminals among us, but when they have to use force against a perp that’s resisting arrest, why do we blame them for the injury or death of the criminal?
Yes, cops make mistakes. Yes, cops can be tough on people, even the law abiding. No one likes to be stopped for a traffic infraction. Sometimes they are abrupt and may chew
us out for a traffic infraction. Often, they are not likable people. If they make true mistakes, they should never be held criminally liable. Fines, days off without pay, suspensions, and firing are more suitable punishments. There are times when police might be criminally negligent, but Kim Potter’s case wasn’t one of them.
The video of the encounter between Wright and the police shows clearly that he was attempting to escape. Should they have just let him go? Would he be easier to arrest at a later time? How many more violent crimes might he have committed before they could finally arrest him? Society and the law have to decide to back our police. Or are we willing to let criminals simply evade arrest by resisting. We here all know the answer. When will society at large get the message?
Anon,
Florida is great. As far as we’re concerned, the pandemic was over a year ago, at least.
We don’t miss the Oregon politics at all. And, of course, our property value just keeps climbing as everyone keeps moving here.
I would support Ron DeSantis for President in 2024, but I would hate to lose him as Governor.
Liberalism has wrecked MN.
Liberalism? There is nothing liberal about it. It’s profoundly regressive and authoritarian.
}}} The difficulty for the jury is the obvious fact that the law is not really clear. The jury instructions don’t help much but that is not really the fault of the judge. Some situations come down to the judgment of the jury on who they think was at fault in the incident. It is hard to see how a law could be written that would decide this question for the jury.
When it comes down to it, they clearly overreached in the charges. She screwed up, and some nontrivial punishment is called for, no question. But more than 15 years? No. Not even close. That’s not what manslaughter brings except in cases of serious negligence resulting in multiple deaths, not a poor weapon choice in the heat of the moment.
The real problem is almost always exactly what it has been for more than 50 years: Jurors don’t know their Rights and Responsibilities as jurors. They think they have to find with the law and the exact evidence, and cannot judge the justice inherent in this specific application of the law in question.
Jury Nullification. Every fucking registered voter in the USA should be fully aware of it.
http://www.fija.org
It is how our system was DESIGNED to produce justice out of an inherently flawed (“made by men”) legislative system. Most injustice occurs as a result of this failure of knowledge.
FWIW, Viva Frei has a vlog about it.
Kim Potter’s UNJUST Conviction, and its Consequences
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or0HvGlDJf8
Dershowitz, cont.
“…Potter Has Right to Bail, Committed ‘No Crime'”
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/alan-dershowitz-kim-potter-bail-appeal/2021/12/25/id/1049930/
I just did move from Minneapolis to Arizona, because I was sick of watching the city die. I thought it would take the progressive lunatics 20 years to effectively loot the place. But with George Floyd, it’s happening before our eyes.
Brooklyn Center is a first ring suburb of Minneapolis. Kind of an interesting place; it survived the loss of a major shopping mall quite well, because the city fathers were sensible businessmen, and watched the bottom line. But it did suffer the spillover of crime from north Minneapolis.
What folks say about Keith Ellison is all true, and there’s more beyond that. How he got a single vote outstate is a mystery; his politics were clear a decade ago. There’s also Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman. He’s a legacy of a very liberal governor. Running the office, Freeman was competent enough. Hell, I voted for him twice.
But I believe that, immediately post-Floyd, he got a call from some folks who reminded him of what happens to prosecutors who don’t play ball. Soros would lavishly fund a challenger, and the Somali precincts would deliver 95-5 votes, and that would be the end of Freeman’s nice salary and benefits.
Thus Freeman never charged any local rioters, despite hundreds of hours of video evidence. He did charge the poor damn truck driver who injured no one, and who was the only person supposed to be on the freeway that day. Freeman did not charge the people who beat up the truck driver.
And Freeman rolled over and showed his neck when Keith Ellison grabbed the Floyd case, and now the Potter case.
Minneapolis and St. Paul are killing Minnesota. Literally, now, as the wealthier suburbs are now experiencing the Somali teen carjackings that once were just in the cities. Looting of retail stores continues, because why not? The cops won’t even show up. I saw plenty of this first hand.
North Minneapolis should have ten officers patrolling at any time. Nowadays, often, there is one. I am not kidding. One. And if there’s a bleeding body on the street, he’s there, and no one is patrolling.