A conviction for a non-crime

 Newsmax:

The conviction of former Minnesota police officer Kim Potter in the death of Daunte Wright was a "double injustice with dangerous implications for policing in America," especially considering the judge in the case denied her release on bail, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz says in an opinion piece Friday.

"Officer Potter, a decorated policewoman with more than two decades of service, simply did not commit a crime," Dershowitz writes in his column, published in The Hill. "Under American law, honest mistakes are not crimes — even if they result in tragic deaths."

Potter, a former suburban Minneapolis police officer, said she confused her handgun for her Taser when she killed Wright during a traffic stop. She will be sentenced in February after a jury convicted her Thursday on two counts of manslaughter.

First-degree manslaughter, the most serious charge against Potter, carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.

"An elderly driver accidentally putting a foot on the gas instead of the brake and killing a child is not necessarily a crime," Dershowitz argued. "It becomes a crime only if the action was reckless, involving a conscious decision to engage in conduct which the defendant knows poses a high risk of serious injury or death."

But, he said, there is no evidence that Potter had consciously decided to fire her service weapon and not her Taser, and there was not sufficient evidence demonstrating her conscious decision to tase Wright was a criminal act.

"Wright had an outstanding warrant for an armed crime, and his conscious decision to resist arrest and get back in his car constituted a direct threat to the life of Potter’s fellow officer and others," said Dershowitz. "She was right to tase him, but she made a mistake by firing the wrong weapon."

He said that it was "even worse" that the judge denied Potter bail.

"There is a substantial likelihood that Potter’s conviction will be reversed by an appellate court," he said. "Potter is not a flight risk nor a danger to the community. The judge’s decision to throw her into prison seems lawless and calculated to appease the public lust for holding police accountable, even in cases where the fact and the law do not justify imprisonment."
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The judge, in this case, appears to have made mistakes.  He is unlikely to face the kind of treatment that Potter has received for her mistake.   The prosecutor was wrong to charge her and the judge was wrong too.  They are doing this at a time when prosecutors are refusing to prosecute real criminals.  This injustice needs to be reversed.