I have read or found very little with regards to the testimonies during her trial .
I must be missing an awful lot of the prosecutions reasoning and testimony for the need to find her guilty.
What convinced the jury that this was more than a stupid unfortunate accident?
How about a discussion here by the more informed-both sides please.
John
word is in her 26 years she saw limited situations like this and panicked. I suppose many people would indeed panic to one degree or another when a suspect refuses to take orders and tries to either flee or kill you or both. I am sure it was an unfortunate mistake. And just how many times does it have to be said, If you do as ordered and not flee or fight you chances are about 100% you will survive. Your choice.
Thanks for bringing this up John.
This is very true mcfarm.
There is no doubt that this was unintentional and an accident of massive proportions.
The governor and others claiming it was race related is pathetic. Would she have pulled out the laser instead of the gun if he was white and not made the mistake? Or would she have thought "oh he's a white guy with warrants trying to flee from being arrested, so I'll let him go"?
But anytime a black person gets shot by a cop......there are people that want to use it for race.
Regardless, even though it was an accident and the guy was trying to flee/avoid being arrested, justice requires her to be held to some degree of accountability.
I would hope that her sentence will take into account that this was totally a mistake and she is very sorry and was pretty devastated for causing this mans death.
Part of seeking justice relates to the mentality of the person that commits the crime. The less they want to acknowledge guilt or responsibility, usually the tougher the judge will be to teach them a lesson with prison time.
In that respect, there is nothing to gain from imposing a harsh sentence on this lady.
Also, cops have to be held to a higher standard when it comes to handling fire arms of course. If this was a couple of guys at home messing around with a gun and one of them accidentally shot the other.....they might get off entirely. That shouldn't happen here.
There is no self defense element to her defense either. The defense claimed that if he drove off, she might have been dragged away in the vehicle. That's not a credible self defense argument.
Another factor is that this happened in the middle of George Floyd land at the peak time in history for intolerance for an incident like this(during the trial for his murder).
Outside of that, in a different place and different time, there's a good chance that you might have been able to get a few jurors to have reasonable doubt about the charges and a hung jury. Apparently, that's where it was for a while (hung jury) but the judge sent them back in to work more on coming up with a unanimous verdict.
Hopefully they will give her a light sentence for those crimes because the circumstances absolutely call for the minimum sentence in my opinion.
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/kim-potter-trial-daunte-wright-killing-verdict-2021-12-23/
I found the title below and that fact extremely odd. When does a story about any crime have a title that states the facial expression of the person's mug shot that is charged/convicted? I don't remember it.
Are they trying to tell us something by this?
The title of an article/story is usually chosen/worded as a sentence that best reflects the contents of the story. Or maybe to get readers to want to read the article. This one was very odd.
Maybe, after seeing many thousands of mug shots, it really was weird for the author of the story to see somebody smiling with a huge grin as if things couldn't be better in their life.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/23/convicted-killer-kim-potter-smiles-in-mugshot/
OK, this source actually addresses the big smile. It's very possible that one news source pointed it out and the other one, read the first one and picked up on it.......along with an elaboration or the other way around:
While Potter’s mugshot may appear shocking, according to some law enforcement officials, there are several reasons why someone may smile in their mugshot photo.
People smiling for the police camera can include intoxicated people, who are unaware of what they’re doing, or people charged with more serious crimes who may be suffering from mental illness.
‘Many times they’re smiling because [while] we think we know it all, they know we only know part of the story,’ Wyndell C Watkins, a member of Tennessee’s Alcatraz East Crime Museum’s Board of Experts, told Delaware Online. ‘And sometimes they smile to get notoriety.’
The maximum penalty for first-degree manslaughter predicated on reckless use/ handling of a firearm is 15 years in prison and/or a $30,000 fine. Since Potter has no criminal history, Minnesota sentencing guidelines recommend a sentence roughly between 6 and 8.5 years in prison.
This would not have happened if he would have just done what he was lawfully told to do read this link.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10329753/Daunte-Wright-victims-tell-violent-past.html
Daunte Wright was not on trial here(I get that his actions and bad decision led to this)
This was the trial of Kim Potter based on HER actions.
Of course we know that Daunte Wright should have done what he was told to do..........just like all violent criminals always do without ever giving any resistance .......right?
Wrong!
Many criminals, especially those with outstanding warrants that know they just got caught, know that it means prison time for them, so they will do the complete opposite of cooperate/do what they are told to do and instead they try to escape.
Anticipating and managing this should be in basic police training 101, especially when it comes to arresting somebody with warrants.
If he didn't have an active warrant, then it might be a bit of a surprise but his reaction was not at all unexpected, especially for a cop of many years. She absolutely knew that he had the warrant and its why she was arresting him.
The warrant was for failing to appear at his court hearing for the charges of being in possession of a pistol without a permit and fleeing a police officer. Gee, why would somebody like that try to flee a police officer again (-:
Ej7It was her job to arrest him. She had no choice and should have also anticipated his reaction. So her massive blunder has absolutely no excuses and we should not give her any benefits of the doubt when it comes to not being able to perform a basic duty that is part of being a cop that does this job.
At least for the obvious blunder element to the crime.
And he wasn't using physical resistance or a threat to her(he had no weapon) that would justify her feeling the immediate need to defend or protect herself from bodily harm. Her partner was just about to put handcuffs on him........then he jumped back into his car to drive off and get away.
There likely would have been a high speed car chase and he could have been a serious threat to other motorists and this was certainly a legit reason to taser him too as well as because of the warrant and evading arrest.
Here's more on the active warrant.
The police confrontation escalated after officers saw what could have been an air freshener hanging illegally from the rearview mirror.
metmike: This is total hogwash. Are we to believe that white people don't get pulled over for having expired license plate registration tags?
And that when white people get pulled over for something legit, cops don't check to see if they have any outstanding arrest warrants?
Cops almost always check for arrest warrants. It's part of their duty and job. This is very often how they find people who are in hiding from the law and charges/court appearances.
They are called ARREST warrants for a reason. The objective is to authorize and encourage cops to automatically arrest people who are avoiding the justice system and the consequences/accountability of breaking the law or responsibility of representing themselves in court.
Daunte was apparently driving with an expired registration and the cops were going to issue a ticket for this. Then, while doing their job, they found the arrest warrant and were going to arrest him.
Interjecting race into it is pathetic. Especially since the cops were doing everything they should have, regardless of the color of his skin.
But there is also no defense of her because he was a bad guy or because he broke the law or because he wasn't following orders.
Bad people's lives or those that break laws don't suddenly drop in value because of their record or behavior...or have less rights as a citizen when interacting with cops.
Criminals get themselves into trouble with potentially harmful consequences that can be their own fault......but its not for a cop to decide what the right justice is or to have a sliding scale for human value and treatment based on what they think.
Everybody should get equal/fair treatment whether they earn it with good behavior or not.
Huge difference between a hand gun and a taser, so I have trouble buying her claim that she thought she was using a taser. The best I get from that is she had no business being in the position she was in.
That being said, I believe it was an act of incompetence. There was no criminal intent, and any charges/convictions should have reflected that, but as is more and more often the case, these trials become political and ignore facts/justice.
Thanks Tim,
jmk, earlier alluded to this below..
Agree about politics often playing a role.
Every time a cop kills a black person, it automatically stays as sensationalized, widely covered national news for weeks.
Often, whether an actual factor or not, BLM and other groups inject race into it.
The blacks killed, often criminals not cooperating become martyrs and celebrities via their unacceptable behavior, that although it absolutely did not justify them being killed, absolutely does not justify them being seen as role models or hero's for the black community.
The reason that it matters is that the biggest problem related to crime in this country is because of the 6 times higher rate of crime committed by young black men than whites.
These encounters between young black criminals and cops, often turning into confrontations that end up with the black man dead that started because the black man was breaking the law and the cop used bad judgment with excessive force to enforce the law are the exact opposite of what we want to use to demonstrate better behavior from the faction in society causing the most violent crime.
It's a huge problem every time we have another incident like this with the message and discussion totally focused on whether the white cop was guilty or not but never discussing what would really put an end to these confrontations.............blacks stopping the committing of crime at a 6 times higher rate.
You give me a perfect police force that never does anything wrong and use them to replace every cop working in America today and I'll give you.............the same dang problem with blacks committing a 6 times higher violent crime rate.
We won't fix that much bigger problem by covering only stories like this one and the MSM/BLM never uttering a word about accountability.
When we are holding the cop accountable is probably not the best time to do it because we don't want to use it to justify the cops criminal behavior.
However, these entities that spend so much time attacking cops and claiming that's the biggest problem, if they cared to solve the real problem, would be spending at least 10 times more time on what is causing all the confrontations.............blacks committing crimes.
But Leroy Brown holding up the grocery store while killing a black clerk and a thousand stories like that from our big cities that dominate the reality of our world every year....... just doesn't catch the attention of people/captivate them in the same way that any story anywhere that features a white cop shooting a black person does.
So people get the sense that white cops shooting blacks is 10 times worse than what it really is and don't realize how bad the black on black violence/homicides are and that its a 100 times worse problem than the one getting all the publicity.
So we are doing nothing new to get better at stopping the real crime...........in fact, we are getting worse at it by weakening the power of the one group of people willing to risk their lives daily to stop crime.......the police.
Related to this:
Previous threads on this:
taking down the cops(good ones too)
13 responses |
Started by metmike - April 21, 2021, 7:26 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/68329/
metmike: This is the best one to read thru!
Using statistics to lie and smear cops
19 responses |
Started by metmike - June 12, 2020, 7:48 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com ...
Please don't hate the cops
Started by metmike - April 29, 2021, 2:37 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/68696/
After looking at his other crimes any one of which he could have been shot legally by the Police if he resisted all I can say is karma is a bitch.
jmk,
After reading the entire story at your link above and verifying everything in it...........I can't help but feel the same way personally.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10329753/Daunte-Wright-victims-tell-violent-past.html
But still, that doesn't change the just outcome of this case based on the facts this officer was faced with when killing this young man.
How about the media stop giving almost all the coverage time to sensationalized incidents like this........)I get that they are in the for profit ratings business and this will drive the bottom line) but if they want to be acting like they have the moral high ground...........then start doing the right thing and address the REAL problem........CRIME and CRIMINALS in this country and stop giving that topic a free pass because it would mean bad press for African Americans and that means they have to ignore it because racial justice in this country means.....reverse discrimination.
The mentality is one that intentionally looks for and assumes that racism is the everywhere and the cause of everything.
It's the same way as with weather and climate change. Global warming causes everything bad everywhere. Including extreme cold and snow and violent tornadoes.........even though it actually DECREASES those based on all authentic science/meteorology and atmospheric physics.
That's the politics taking over as Tim mentioned.
Quintessential example here with this headline:
"Some scholars and commentators do still claim that there is no racial inequity in police killings. In 2019, David Johnson at the University of Maryland and his colleagues published a study in PNAS claiming no evidence of anti-black disparities in police shootings.
Similarly, African-American economist Roland Fryer, also at Harvard University, has argued that there is no evidence for racial disparities in police shootings. These studies have received widespread media coverage.
The problem is that these studies focus solely on people who interact with the police, for instance by being stopped, says Feldman. The underlying argument is that if black people commit more crimes, a higher rate of police killings would follow.
“You can’t do that in a valid way,” says Feldman. “If there’s racial bias in why police stop people or investigate crimes in the first place, it’s going to obscure the racial bias in police shootings or police killings.” The 2019 study has received multiple critiques from other scholars because it didn’t account for this problem."
metmike: In order to appear objective, they site another study that contridicts this(that makes much more sense) but then immediately give the reader a reason for why that other study is not valid and only to believe their headline and everything else in the story.
In my opinion, that other study(below) is light years more objective and valid than this one and the story( violent crime is by far the main determinant/factor, not race)......but we can see which one the media picks out to push their agenda.
Flawed cops =6 times higher crime rate by blacks.
Perfect cops =6 times higher crime rate by blacks
There's your main problem.
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877
"Finally, the lack of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity and the impact of race-specific crime are consistent with an exposure argument, whereby per capita racial disparity in fatal shootings is explained by non-Whites’ greater exposure to the police through crime. This explanation is consistent with studies that have used violent crime as a benchmark for testing disparity (20, 23⇓–25)."
But it only goes a small part of the way to SEE the problem as being the extremely high crime rate from blacks. One has to come up with solutions to address it and make it better, which can only be applied after acknowledging what the real problem is.
These have been some of my ideas.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/53752/#53753
The fact that some scientist/moderator from Yahoo Indiana can see the problem and have good solutions and our elected and highly paid politicians and the ratings craving MSM just want to blame the police is very telling.
It means that there ARE solutions.
It means that politics and self serving interests are much more important to those sources than to really help blacks in an authentic way.
The assumption is that there are not behavioral or cultural differences between races, and this logical fallacy perpetuates the issue. Data is readily available, but routinely rejected as somehow flawed. It's almost like someone has an agenda or something.
Study Suggests Racial Gap In Speeding In New Jersey - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
The study involved photographing tens of thousands of drivers on the turnpike last spring while clocking speed with a radar gun. It found that black drivers sped much more than other drivers, according to three people who have reviewed the unreleased report.
TimNew: Try this little experiment. Park on the side of the hiway someday and determine the race of the drivers as they pass. It's even more impossible at night.
Another experiment, and I strongly recommend you don't try it... Next time you are stopped by a cop, be aggressive. Refuse to comply with any request. Scream things like "Don't shoot me Pig!!", and then run away. I don't think your race wil have much to do with the outcome.