US court finds cop guilty of manslaughter

A US court on Thursday found a white ex-Minneapolis police officer guilty of two manslaughter charges for killing a Black man when she confused her gun with her Taser during a traffic stop.

Kim Potter, 49, faces around seven years in prison for shooting unarmed Daunte Wright, 20,  on April 11 as she tried to arrest him for a pending warrant.

The shooting provoked a major outcry as it took place during fellow former police officer Derek Chauvin's murder trial that sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the world in 2020. Chauvin was jailed for 22.5 years for suffocating Black man George Floyd in the same city.

What happened at the trial?

The mostly white, 12-person jury reached its guilty verdict on first and second degree manslaughter after four days of deliberations.

Brooklyn Center officer Kim Potter, who said she "didn't want to hurt anybody" during the trial, showed no visible reaction when the verdicts were read.

Jurors saw police body and dashboard camera footage that showed Potter and an officer she was training, Anthony Luckey, pull over Wright for having an expired number plate and an air freshener on his rear-view mirror.

On the side of the road Luckey realized Wright had a warrant out for his arrest after failing to appear in court on a weapons possession charge.

As Luckey tried to handcuff Wright, he pulled away and got back into his car.

Potter then signalled she was going to Taser Wright before firing a single bullet into Wright's chest.

"I shot him. ... I grabbed the wrong (expletive) gun," Potter said in the video footage. "I'm going to prison," she added a minute later. Two days later, Potter resigned from the force.

What were the main arguments in the trial?

As the incident itself was caught on camera, the facts of the case were not in dispute. 

Both sets of lawyers agreed that Potter had accidentally drawn the wrong weapon and did not want to kil Wright.

Instead, prosecutors had to prove that the police officer of 26 years was reckless enough to be in violation of the state's manslaughter statutes.

Her experience and the fact she had taken Taser-specific courses in the months before the shooting, made her mistake indefensible, the Minneapolis prosecutors argued.

They said Potter took a conscious and unreasonable risk "by her culpable negligence" in using any weapon against the unarmed Wright.

The defense, for its part, tried to lay the finger of blame on Wright for resisting arrest. His actions had pushed Potter use force, her lawyers argued.

Potter's attorneys pinned their hopes on the testimony of psychologist Dr Laurence Miller who said "action error" under stress was to blame for the mistake.

Wright's parents broke into tears as Judge Regina Chu announced the guilty verdict.

Demonstrators standing in the cold outside the courtroom chanted Daunte Wright's name and hugged as the news filtered through their ranks.

Potter was taken into custody as she awaits her sentence set for February 18.

jc/msh (AP, Reuters)