The True Cluprit In The Tragic Shooting Death of Daunte Wright… Apparrently.
“Being pulled over for a broken taillight shouldn’t end in death. Too often, it does.”
This was a line from a Washington Post article that led Jack Marshall over at Ethics Alarms to make a post tying the idea to the case of Daunte Wright. And seeing as how watching high-profile criminal cases is a new guilty pleasure of mine, I thought I’d tune in. The narrative of “x shouldn’t be a death sentence” has always bothered me, but I don’t think I’ve addressed it directly… Because while it might make for a convenient bumper sticker, except in some pretty egregious circumstances, reasonable people usually won’t describe that as an accurate description of events. Very few people are killed for their broken tail light, you have to view the situation in totality. The taillight might be the pretense for the stop, but by the time shots are fired, the taillight has no more relevance than the color of the car. Below is a version of the comments I made at Ethics Alarms, edited together and arranged for clarity, with some small additions, corrections to grammar, some spelling and the like.
First Rittenhouse, now this.
I’ve followed this case since jury selection. And boy howdy this one has been dry… The prosecution seems to be struggling, was struggling from day one, with a case that had a very difficult fact pattern. And part of that struggle is a really hard-to-watch, awkward badgering of witnesses to try to get certain hard-to-arrive-at-naturally takes into evidence. It’s rough. We’re on day 12 today of a case that, while admittedly being contentious, is not particularly complicated. To date, some of the more interesting parts of this were probably during the jury selection… by the third day of jury selection the state had used all their unqualified passes, so they had to let through a finance guy who LARPs with a battleaxe on the weekends and had some very pro-defense inclinations, as an example. There was also an ACAB activist who tried to lie to sneak onto the jury, but one of Potter’s lawyers, Paul Engh, had scoured the potential jurists social media feeds and threatened to feed her back quotes about how cops should be shot. The shock in the potential jurists voice and the immediate change in her demeanor was delicious.
Regardless, I think that I’ve seen at least what the jury has in this case. The only thing they’ve kept from the feeds are the postmortem pictures of the deceased, and I’m pretty sure they’re doing that because Daunte’s pants slid off during first aid and they didn’t want his junk on primetime.
With that in mind, empathetically: Daunte was not shot over for a busted taillight.
What Actually Happened?
Daunte was pulled over because he had an air freshener hanging off the rearview. Apparently this is a ticketable offense in some jurisdictions. That doesn’t mean people generally get obstructed vision tickets… Things like this are often pretenses to see if you can find more. And boy howdy, did they.
Before they got out of their car, for instance, the officers knew that the tags on the vehicle’s insurance was expired. When they interacted with Daunte, Daunte told them he didn’t have his license on him, but he gave them his name, date of birth, and some other information. The officers noted the strong smell of marijuana and saw some bud in the console. They went back to the car, ran the information, and were able to surmise a few things:
1) The car was not in fact insured. (They didn’t know this at the time, but it hadn’t been for years)
2) Daunte did not have a driver’s license. (They didn’t know this at the time, but he never had)
3) Daunte had an outstanding warrant for a weapons violation. (They didn’t know this at the time, but he tried to extort rent money out of a tenant at gunpoint.)
4) Daunte also had a restraining order out against him from his ex-girlfriend, and there was a female passenger in the car.
5) Marijuana is still fully illegal in Minnesota.
Have we mentioned that Daunte was 20? I’m sure that a year or two down the road, this upstanding young citizen would be making all kinds of headlines.
So the officers decided to make an arrest. They asked Daunte to get out of the car, and he did, two of the officers told Daunte that he was under arrest, Officer Luckey tried to cuff Daunte, Daunte slipped him and got into the car. Officer Johnson reached into the car through the passenger door and held the gearshift in park while Luckey struggled with Daunte. Officer Potter grabbed her gun and said “I’m going to tase you.” waited two seconds “I’m going to tase you”, a second “taser taser taser” and shot Daunte once in the chest, collapsing both lungs and bursting his heart. Daunte shifted the car into drive and died with his foot on the gas, his vehicle veered into oncoming traffic and struck the vehicle of two elderly individuals.
What are the legal arguments?
Addressing the obvious for a second: She yelled “taser” and shot a gun.
The accepted narrative from everyone involved seems to be that she meant to shoot a taser, but drew the gun. The prosecution hasn’t stipulated it, but you can tell from their questions that had they ever had an inkling about trying to assert this was intentional, they’ve long ago given up on it. It’s obvious to me that she thought she was holding the taser for a couple of other reasons as well: She pulled the trigger once, which is standard for a taser but not a gun, and her reaction was too immediate and emotional, in my opinion, not to be legitimate.
That points towards this being a mistake. And it bears note that the entire interaction from “please step out of the car” to the shot was 32 seconds. There’s muscle memory involved. It was a high-stress interaction.
The state is arguing that Potter acted recklessly, that she had training enough and the weapons were different enough that she should never have drawn the wrong weapon. They’re also arguing that shooting into a car is reckless, because regardless of whether the weapon is a taser or a gun, the person you shoot could seize or slump and put his foot on the gas, and that creates a dangerous situation, not only for the person you shoot, but the passenger of the car, oncoming traffic, and yourself. Their argument, I think, is weak… Potter’s use-of-force expert (Steve Ijames, and oh-my-God Google that guys resume, he is impressive) pointed out that the car was not in motion, so there wasn’t much danger of Daunte driving off if he were tased, that the taser was a reasonable use of force, and that in a case where an officer (in this case officer Johnson) was inside the vehicle, the possibility of a moving car represented a significant danger to the officers, and lethal force was justified.
Which led to the defense arguing that while Potter obviously meant to grab the taser instead of the gun, the facts of the case are such that Potter could have grabbed the gun and been justified in shooting Daunte. Regardless, the narrative is missing elements of recklessness and disregard necessary for a conviction. This is, I think, convincing, especially seeing as how the defense has gotten three of the prosecution’s witnesses to say so. The state is trying a narrative that is almost textbook cumulative (from my lay Googling of the term after Potter’s other attorney, Earl Grey (his actual name) made the “cumulative” objection for the 6th time, which I’d never heard before.) and beside the dangers of a mistrial, part of the problem with calling half of the entire police department to say the same damn things is that some of them won’t be sympathetic to your actions, they see themselves in that situation, and damn right, they’d have done the same thing.
Back to The Original Topic
Daunte wasn’t shot “Being pulled over for a broken taillight.” He wasn’t shot for the little hanging tree. He was pulled over for the tree. He was going to be arrested on his outstanding warrant. And then he was shot because he tried to take off in a vehicle to avoid an arrest that was legitimate and represented an imminent danger to officers on the scene.
A couple of things stood out:
First: Daunte Wright was a drug dealer. I’m usually permissive about drug related infractions, but the law is the law. One of the pieces of evidence that was kept from the jury is that Daunte had a pot scale and paraphernalia in the car. This needs to be contextually coupled with his outstanding warrant, lack of a license, and lack of vehicle registration and history of avoiding arrest. Daunte’s mother testified that Daunte called while the officers were running his info and that he was worried about the vehicle tags. Can we all just take a second to step back and appreciate the perjury? Of course, I don’t know for certain that that isn’t what Daunte said… But they were all aware of his criminality. The car’s tags are what he was worried about? Also worth noting: Daunte’s blood tests came back positive (and on the high side of the scale, no pun indented) for THC. He was driving while high as a kite.
Second: The officers had a whole bunch of wonderful reasons not to let him drive away: he wasn’t insured, he wasn’t licensed, he had outstanding warrants, he was probably high, there was a female passenger in the car, and she could have been the person who had the restraining order against him, and probably a dozen other things that I either don’t know the intricacies of law to describe or are kind of chintzy. The prosecution is arguing that the officers could have let Daunte drive off. Sure they could have, but at what point do you close the PD and call it a day then? If you can’t arrest scum like Daunte Wright because he’s in a car and the car could be dangerous, then you might as well just put a lid on law enforcement.
And you know who else could have done something to prevent the death of Daunte Wright? Daunte.
Daunte could have gotten a license. He could have insured his car. He could have walked. He could have bussed. He could have not tried to threaten a tenant with a gun. He could have not beaten his ex. He could have complied with the arrest that he knew was legitimate. This all seems orders of magnitude more reasonable than “They should have let the uninsured, unlicensed, high as a kite, girlfriend-beating drug dealer with outstanding warrants for weapons violations drive away because he resisted arrest”.
I’d make a great juror.
Daunte Wright was not killed because of an air freshener. He was killed because the totality of his actions put him on a crash course with mortality. This was never an individual destined to die old.