Dallas Cop Gets 10 Years In Prison For Killing Her Neighbor

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Fired Dallas police officer Amber Guyger leaves the courtroom after a jury found her guilty of murder Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2019, in Dallas. Guyger shot and killed Botham Jean, an unarmed 26-year-old neighbor in his own apartment last year. She told police she thought his apartment was her own and that he was an intruder. (Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News via AP, Pool)

DALLAS (AP) — A white Dallas police officer was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison for killing her black neighbor in his apartment, which she said she mistook for her own unit one floor below.

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Amber Guyger didn’t appear to show much reaction, at least from the angle of a live camera stream, as the judge read the jury’s sentence. It came a day after the jury convicted her of murder in the September 2018 killing of Botham Jean.

Guyger’s sentence was met with boos and jeers by a crowd gathered outside the courtroom. “It’s a slap in the face,” one woman said.

As Jean’s family walked out of the courtroom, the group that had been outside began a chant of, “No justice! No peace!” Two young black women hugged each other and cried.

Prosecutors had asked jurors to sentence Guyger to at least 28 years, which is how old Jean would have been if he was still alive.

The jury could have sentenced the former officer to up to life in prison or as little as two years.

The basic facts of the unusual shooting were not in dispute throughout the trial. Guyger, returning from a long shift that night, entered Jean’s fourth-floor apartment and shot him. He had been eating a bowl of ice cream before she fired.

Guyger said she parked on the wrong floor and mistook Jean’s apartment for her own, which was directly below his, and mistook him for a burglar. In the frantic 911 call played repeatedly during the trial, Guyger said “I thought it was my apartment” nearly 20 times. Her lawyers argued that the identical physical appearance of the apartment complex from floor to floor frequently led to tenants going to the wrong apartments.

But prosecutors questioned how Guyger could have missed numerous signs that she was in the wrong place. They also asked why she didn’t call for backup instead of walking into the apartment if she thought she was being burglarized and suggested she was distracted by sexually explicit phone messages she had been exchanging with her police partner, who was also her lover.

The shooting drew widespread attention because of the strange circumstances and because it was one in a string of shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers.

One of the Jean family lawyers hailed the verdict as “a victory for black people in America” after it was handed down Tuesday.

The jury was largely made up of women and people of color.


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Jer
Jer
4 years ago

That is a fair sentence. It obviously wasn’t premeditated, but she did commit manslaughter and deserves time in prison.

PaulinSaudi
PaulinSaudi
4 years ago

Seems about right. The whole thing went quickly too, no long delays.

lazy-boy
lazy-boy
4 years ago

quite a sentence to get for a mistake….

Nachum
Nachum
4 years ago

The headline for this article was wrong. It should have stated “EX-Dallas cop”; secondly, Ms. Guyger was lucky that she only received 10 years for murder. There was a cop in South Carolina, who received twice that amount (20 years) for killing a suspect (shooting him in the back), for running away. These kinds of trials and convictions for cops, and long sentences for these types of crimes, are very rare. For example, there was a case in Westchester County, NY, about six years ago, whereby a former U.S. Marine, who was a senior citizen, accidentally set off the burglar alarm to his apartment. The local cops were summoned, and he told them that it was an error and would not let them into his apartment. He was an elderly man, legally in his own home, without any clothes on. However, the cops forced their way in. One thing led to another, and one of the trigger happy cops shot the former Marine dead. It was similar to this case, as the deceased was in his own home, and had not committed a crime. The cop who killed the older veteran had a history of complaints and violence. However, he got away with killing that poor man, and was never indicted. My point is that in most of these cases, cops will state “I thought that he was going for a weapon, or I felt threatened”, etc., and the grand juries usually believes those stories. In this case, there was some accountability, and some measure of justice.