When she was convicted, Kim Potter, was still claiming that she didn’t know she’d shot Daunte Wright with her service weapon rather than her taser. While the court did not find that Potter’s mistake warranted a complete dismissal of her charges, they did give her a much reduced sentence. I’m assuming the fact that she was convicted at all, had quite a lot to do with the protests going on leading up to and including the final days of the trial. 

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Whatever the case happens to be, the city of Minneapolis must be getting pretty tired of doling out tens of millions upon tens of millions of dollars to the families of victims killed by that city’s police officers. And the family of Daunte Wright is simply the most recent. 

Since Derek Chauvin’s trial, the city paid out $27M to the family of George Floyd, and another $20M to the family of Justine Damond, who was shot by officer Mohamed Noor, who responded to the Damond’s 911 call. Noor was also later convicted on similar charges to Potter.

Perhaps after all that, the mere $3.2M the Wright family has received in a settlement payout from the city is a consolation for their loss. But I seriously doubt they feel quite as satisfied by the fact that Potter only received 16 months in jail for two convictions including first- and second-degree manslaughter. 

Now, I did a little research on this to find out where her sentence landed against the standard for charges of this type. And I found out that, according to the Shouse Law Center in California, the maximum sentence for even one conviction of first-degree manslaughter, as averaged across the country, is a decade in prison. Potter’s sentencing, then, might seem like a slap in the face for the family of Daunte Wright, as her conviction entailed two manslaughter charges in total. 

The plot thickened, however, when it was revealed that Daunte Wright had a warrant issued for his arrest at the time of the shooting. And the charge for which Wright was being sought was for aggravated robbery. 

Aggravated is putting it nicely, given the nature of the incident that I’ll describe in a moment. But the word “aggravated” is the word used in the courts to process charges that involve or include a weapon of some sort. And that can be anything from a weapon-specific item like a knife or gun, to some other object used to cause harm to the victim, which can include things like hammers, baseball bats, and so on. 

In fact, in my latest documentary, I filmed the plight of a small town activist who was so hated by the local government that they tried several times unsuccessfully to convict him on felony aggravated assault, and the thing they named as a weapon in the obviously conjured incident, was a forklift that has a maximum speed of about 5mph. It was a crazy addition to an already crazy film about nuclear level civil rights violations in a tiny, desert town. You can check that out at LIF.com/films, you can also go to LIF.com and click the link for the movie, BTLQ, or you can find a direct link to the film in the article for this podcast. 

According to a warrant obtained by the Daily Mail, which is a digital rag published out of the UK, Wright had violated his parole and failed to appear in a hearing related to the matter. The report also indicated that this information was known to Potter before Daunte Wright was killed. This puts a different spin on the story that we are hearing in the US, since the original charge stemmed from Daunte Wright having held a woman at gunpoint and robbed her of $820 she’d taken out from a cashed check to pay her rent. The bond set for that warrant at the time of his shooting was $100,000. 

In other words, 4,000 miles away, the news story broke of a violent criminal who the state wanted so badly that they issued a six-figure bond for his capture, and during that pursuit he was killed. However, in the US, the story spun by liberal mass media was that yet another black man was shot by yet another white cop, and justice translates to that cop going to jail. 

The facts reported in Britain included that Potter knew Wright was a violent offender and acted on that knowledge. And here in the States, we were given the woke media rhetoric that Minneapolis is a breeding ground for white cops targeting innocent black males. 

Whether or not the outcry over Daunte’s killing was simply fueled by recent police violence, or if the majority of those in support of Wright’s family were unaware of his crimes at the time, is not currently known, since I was only able to find it through deeper digging. However, little remains to be available from the major networks that clearly dominate public access to news and information about the case. 

It seems, however, that there was no problem for the British newspapers to obtain the police records, revealing the entire timeline of events detailed in the arrest record and warrant issued against Daunte Wright. Check the article for this podcast for those records. They’re quite revealing.

Whatever the case, the settlement and the lackluster jail sentence are likely a result of the courts attempting to balance out the public outcry with the officer’s knowledge of the facts in the matter.