'A smack on the wrist': Kim Potter released after 16 months in prison for killing Daunte Wright

Kim Potter, the former Minnesota police officer who fatally shot 20-year-old Daunte Wright in April 2021, was released from prison on Monday after serving just over a year behind bars. Potter was released at 4 a.m. due to safety concerns and the possibility of violent protests outside the prison, according to officials at Minnesota Correctional Facility-Shakopee, where Potter served her 16-month term.

“Based on the intelligence we gathered, we released Ms. Potter at a time we felt was safest for her and for everyone at the correctional facility,” a spokesperson for the prison said in a statement.

The 26-year police veteran was convicted of first- and second-degree manslaughter in conjunction with a traffic stop during which she claimed she mistook her gun for her Taser and fatally shot Wright in Brooklyn Center, a Minneapolis suburb. Potter will serve the remainder of her sentence under supervised release in Wisconsin until Dec. 21, according to the department.

Her trial and sentencing happened during the height of civil unrest in Minnesota following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020.

Judge Regina Chu, who is now retired, sentenced Potter to two years in prison. “You shall serve two-thirds of that time, or 16 months, in prison and a third of supervised release, assuming no disciplinary offenses,” Chu said during the 2021 sentencing. Under supervised release, Potter can’t purchase or be in the vicinity of firearms, ammunition or dangerous weapons.

During Potter’s trial, she apologized to Wright’s family. "I am so sorry that I brought the death of your son, father, brother, uncle, grandson, nephew and the rest of your family to your home. I understand a mother's love, and I'm sorry I broke your heart. My heart is broken for all of you,” she said.

But the Wright family says an apology is still not enough. “Some say I should forgive to be at peace, but how can I?” Katie Wright, Daunte’s mother, told CNN. “I am so angry. She is going to be able to watch her kids have kids and be able to touch them. It gave us some sense of peace knowing she would not be able to hold her sons. She has two. I can’t hold my son.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who gave the eulogy at Wright’s funeral, called Potter's release “outrageous” and said she should face the “full extent of the law.”

“Her sentence, handed down by Judge Regina Chu, was well below Minnesota’s minimum of six years and significantly less than the maximum of eight years in which the Wright family, Attorney Ben Crump and myself had pushed for,” Sharpton said Monday in a statement. “[It] is an insult to all Americans who believe in justice.”

Wright left behind an infant son, and his family is still seeking justice two years after his death.

“What African Americans and Latinos are calling for is simply accountability first. When you look at the death of a young man versus more than a dozen months in jail, that seems unequal and incongruent,” Kalfani Ture, an assistant professor of African American studies at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland and a former police officer, told Yahoo News.

Ture says the issue is accountability. “This is just indicative that our criminal justice system needs to be assessed for its fairness,” he said. “How is it that one could do more time for petty theft than in this situation where somebody loses their life?”

For decades, experts have acknowledged that there are racial disparities in the criminal justice system. According to the Sentencing Project, Black people are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.

The Minnesota Freedom Fund, an organization that works to end oppressive jailing, says it hopes to see a world one day where Black and brown people are entitled to second chances, similar to Potter.

“But in a society that routinely visits long sentences of incarceration on hundreds of thousands of people, many for low-level offenses, it pains us to see former Officer Kim Potter serve such a relatively short period for so grievous a harm,” the organization said in a tweet Monday.

Potter, who formerly served as president of the local police union in Brooklyn Center, Minn., submitted a letter of resignation after the shooting. “Essentially this was a smack on the wrist, two years. Maybe she doesn’t go back into law enforcement, [but] she certainly gets to keep her pension,” Ture said.

During the sentencing, the judge called Potter’s actions a tragic mistake, indicating that her case differed from that of Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murder in the death of Floyd.

“This is not a cop found guilty of murder for using his knee to pin down a person for nine and a half minutes as he gasped for air,” Chu said.

The “mistake” that killed Wright was Potter's mistaking of her firearm for her Taser — two devices that are held on different sides of an officer’s body and are different in color and weight, according to Ture.

“It is just gross negligence. I don’t know how she made that mistake,” Ture said. “The number of times an officer has pulled their firearm for the Taser is so statistically insignificant. And the reason why it is statistically insignificant is because we train exhaustively to avoid this mistake.”

Seth Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, testified at Potter's trial that he knew of “fewer than 20” cases since Tasers were introduced in 1993 in which officers mistakenly used their firearms instead.

Along with Potter's two-year sentence, Brooklyn Center, where Wright was killed, agreed to pay his family more than $3.25 million, which they have not yet received.

“Black and brown men deserve to grow old; they deserve to live their lives and they deserve justice when their lives are taken from them. We will not sit idly by and allow nonconsequential actions such as this to endure,” Sharpton said.