The more I thought about the conviction of Kim Potter, the more unsettled I became about her guilty verdict. So, I did some research on Minnesota Law and the charges of First and Second Degree Manslaughter. I just didn’t feel it was justice that a cop attempting to make an arrest of a thug should be punished so harshly and have her life ruined. I now hold the jury reached the wrong verdict in the case.
I contemplated the political climate in Minnesota and the consequences of the George Floyd trial which I also thought was a terrible miscarriage of justice inasmuch as Derek Chauvin committed no crime whatsoever, unless you want to throw out the pages of his Police Manual pertaining to restraining hysterical subjects. There was an illustration of a cop applying a knee restraint to the neck.
Keith Ellison as state attorney general, I find to be a very divisive individual and is acting at the behest of any angry mob who believe police target black people in particular due to systemic racism. In both cases, especially in Potter, what really should have happened was the AG should have used his discretion and not filed any charges whatsoever against either defendant; they were doing their jobs.
But, in both cases charges were filed which precipitated court cases. If Potter was guilty of a First Degree Manslaughter in Minnesota, she would have had to cause the death of another “in committing or attempting to commit a misdemeanor or gross misdemeanor offense with such force and violence that death of or great bodily harm to any person was reasonably foreseeable…" But Potter was not committing or attempting to commit a misdemeanor or gross misdemeanor, she was executing a lawful arrest of a criminal. Further, she did not act with “such force or violence” that death or great bodily harm was foreseeable. On the contrary, what was foreseeable to her when she tried to pull her taser was minor injury at worst.
The second degree manslaughter charge requires that death be caused “by the person’s culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk, and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.” There was no evidence that Potter “consciously” took the chance of “causing death” to Daunte Wright. Consciously, she was trying to use her taser, which would not have killed or seriously injured Wright. In fact, she shouted taser, taser, taser as she held the weapon which of course turned out not to be a taser.
IMO, Kim Potter should be exonerated on appeal, but like the case of Chauvin, that is unlikely to happen in an appellate court in the State of Minnesota. Reversal would likely cause rioting. So now we have two lives destroyed of two cops trying to do their jobs. It seems to me that not too many law enforcement professionals would want to be cops in Minneapolis given what happened in these two cops who now reside in prison, their lives torn asunder.
