(C) Minnesota Reformer
This story was originally published by Minnesota Reformer and is unaltered.
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Debating justice: Kim Potter’s sentence and AG Ellison’s takeover of a juvenile murder case [1]
['More From Author', 'April', 'Michael Friedman']
Date: 2023-04-24
Former Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter is being released from prison this week, having served 16 months. She was convicted of manslaughter, first and second degree, for shooting to death Daunte Wright on April 11, 2021.
As has been widely reported and remains undisputed, the conviction resulted from an act Potter did not intend; she believed she was firing a stun gun when in fact she pulled the trigger of her service revolver.
We tend to speak of justice as if its application is obvious and we share a single common understanding of what it means. Justice is served! Justice has prevailed!
In the abstract, justice seems to describe some consequence that allows the return to a settled equilibrium after a disturbance. A result that is collectively perceived as fair.
But that leaves plenty of room to argue the particulars. The Potter case well exposed how there’s a lack of consensus in defining what our justice system is expected to deliver.
As we don’t tend to acknowledge that there are competing views for how justice is best accomplished, we resort to our own subjective meter for determining whether or not in a given instance justice has resulted. Our views carry great risk of inconsistency.
The Potter case generated controversy at multiple stages. Initially, the dispute concerned whether a nonintentional act should even be prosecuted. Because the charge of manslaughter covers situations in which recklessness or negligence leads to a harmful outcome, a jury could and did ultimately find Potter guilty, no matter her intent.
Even if the result conformed with law, consider how rare it has been for a surgeon to be prosecuted for recklessness and negligence, and how we generally accept that professionals make mistakes and lawsuits are the appropriate legal consequence. Whether police should be afforded the same privilege of being able to make mistakes that produce horribly tragic outcomes, while only being subject to civil liability and licensing consequences, is a reasonable question no matter how one generally feels about the nature or quality of policing.
(Perhaps police would more easily be seen as deserving such privilege if they, like surgeons, carried individualized malpractice insurance and could more easily be sued in their personal capacity?)
The later controversy was Judge Regina Chu sentencing Potter for only a short duration, which seemed to emphasize the absence of intent along with, implicitly, the limited rehabilitative goals that prison time in this situation would accomplish. Many believed this result undercut the jury’s finding of guilt on both counts.
What happened was that at prosecution and sentencing, competing values about justice were applied.
The values informing Potter’s prosecution by the Minnesota attorney general — and reflected by the legislative creation of the manslaughter statutes that were used — give emphasis to the victim and the outcome instead of the perpetrator and the act.
The justice priority is to establish a societal vengeance on behalf of the victim (or, more broadly, society) for that outcome. While vengeance may seem to suggest a motivation that is shamefully primitive or too driven by emotion, one can argue that when uniformly applied, and if perceived as fair, vengeance through sentencing inhibits the greater harms that might otherwise arise from uncontrolled private acts of retribution. And as has been seen in many instances, the emotions of victims or the grief of victim families can be powerful influencers.
The values informing Chu’s sentence emphasize factors of deterrence and rehabilitation. Under this approach, the focus is on the criminal offender’s experience and not the victim’s, on the basis that the goal is to individually address the circumstances of the crime in a manner that makes it most likely that the offender will never commit another crime as well as convert into (or return to being) a productive member of society. Doing so will effectively require taking into account the offender’s potential for successfully addressing problems, for instance: addiction or untreated mental health, trauma history, and other social and environmental factors.
Concern for the prevention of future criminal acts might also take into consideration the offender’s age (brain development), state of mind, and self-recognition of the harm. If the crime was intentional, had it been long-planned or impulsive? Are there indicators of feeling guilt and remorse?
Even when all the factors may add up to a defendant highly unlikely to commit another crime, a judge may at sentencing still need to consider the value of maintaining some degree of uniformity.
Though a judge may emphasize one or the other of these mindsets about achieving justice, they may openly or otherwise also recognize the competing values. Which essentially is what Chu did. That Potter went to prison at all reflected a family and societal need for vengeance when considering the tragedy that Wright had been shot dead. But in keeping the sentence extremely short, she determined that the lack of deterrent and rehabilitative goals allowed for limited imprisonment.
The recent controversy regarding a juvenile prosecution that Attorney General Keith Ellison took over from Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty reflected a similar values argument about how justice should be achieved. Moriarty emphasized her reliance on data about juveniles who have been prosecuted as adults, which shows that a lengthy prison sentence provides no additional deterrent value while carrying a high risk of being counterproductive to rehabilitative goals that best supports the long-term safety of the community. (Not as frequently discussed was the potential benefit of the cooperative testimony the teens could provide in pursuit of the prosecution against an adult who had allegedly planned and directed the murder — and who was likely seen by Moriarty as the greater long-term community danger.)
Though underlying political motivations may also be a subject of speculation, Ellison appeared to comfortably emphasize a view that Moriarty’s plea deal carried insufficient vengeance for either the victim’s family or greater community – even as vengeance is a term he clearly avoided. Not having either the interest or ability to dispute the data Moriarty relied upon, he explained his motivations vaguely as upholding “community expectations”.
Ellison indicated he did not expect to ever make a similar request again. His legislative and defense attorney experience certainly informs him of the general problem with centering justice on vengeance and victims — that it lends itself to sentence inflation.
For victims, it is common for existing sentencing to always feel unfairly short. If five years is standard, then the fact the crime was still committed logically leads a victim to the belief that six or more years must be a fairer outcome in their instance given what has been suffered. After all, five years has clearly been proven to be an inadequate deterrent. Over time, this adds up as pressure on legislatures, which tend to amend sentence lengths upward, one of many inputs for the mass incarceration era we inhabit.
No surprise then that progressive prosecutors like Moriarty, and others who seek to end mass incarceration, strongly favor prioritizing a focus on the act and the perpetrator — and not the victim and outcome — in accordance with rehabilitation goals that create a sufficient minimum standard for deterrence. Which even if not always offering alternatives to prison certainly seek to minimize its use.
The very approach Chu applied in regard to Kim Potter.
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[1] Url:
https://minnesotareformer.com/2023/04/24/debating-justice-kim-potters-sentence-and-ellisons-takeover-of-a-juvenile-murder-case/
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