Alanna Gillis

Opinion Editor

Amg7393@psu.edu

Kim Potter, the former Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Duante Wright during a traffic stop, has been sentenced to two years in state custody. She will serve 16 months in prison, with the remainder of her sentence on supervised release.  Potter was convicted of first- and second- degree manslaughter during a trial in December 2021. 

However, the recommended sentencing guidelines in Minnesota for first-degree manslaughter is roughly seven years. Potter was sentenced to less than half the recommended time, and was given, in my opinion, too light of a sentence and too much grace considering the situation. 

Potter killed Wright during a traffic stop last year when she apparently mistook her handgun for her taser. The death of a young Black man came at the hands of a police officer who should have clearly known the difference between her gun and her taser. I find it hard to believe that she couldn’t tell the difference between the two, as police training in most cases will have officers holster their guns on their dominant side, and holster their taser on their nondominant side. 

The confusion between these two, one a nonlethal method to subdue someone and the other lethal, is called “weapons confusion”. An expert witness brought into the trial by the prosecution testified that he was aware of less than 20 instances of this weapons confusion in the last 21 years. 

It is very clear to me that it must be very, very difficult to confuse the two items on a police belt if there have been less than one instance of weapons confusion per year. Given that information, I believe that Potter was given a significantly lower sentence than what she deserved. I think the reason for this is pretty clear too; our justice system has a long and storied history of going easy on white women on the stand as well as going easy on police officers who are being charged with violent crimes. Kim Potter is the combination of these two identities, and I strongly believe that is the reason she will only serve two years in state custody. 

Judge Regina Chu sentenced Potter to less than the recommended number of years due to a list of what factors she said called for a lighter sentence. The list includes that, “the scene was chaotic, tense and rapidly evolving,” which required quick decision-making by Potter. Chu also claims that Potter’s decisions were not driven by personal animosity toward Wright. “Officer Potter made a mistake that ended tragically,” Chu states, “she never intended to hurt anyone. Her conduct cries out for a sentence significantly below the guidelines”. 

Police officers are one of the groups of people who we, as the general public, should be able to fully trust in situations which are “chaotic, tense, and rapidly evolving”. They have gone through extensive training to prepare them for situations with those qualities, and handling situations like that is quite literally the job description. It is the reason their jobs exist in the first place. If we drop the standards for our police officers so low that they are allowed to make lethal mistakes because a situation is too “chaotic, tense, and rapidly evolving”, then we need to seriously reevaluate how we are training the people who are supposed to serve and protect us. 

Police officers have been given the privilege of being armed and the privilege of trusting them to use that power correctly. They need to be held accountable for the damage they cause when they should know better. We cannot keep giving police officers grace when they make “mistake(s) that end tragically”. 

Duante Wright is not coming back, and his parents will have to live with that pain for the rest of their lives; Officer Potter made sure of that when she made the mistake of shooting him instead of subduing him nonlethally. There is no reason why she should be given such a light sentence for a crime that should never have happened in the first place.