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Juror says holding Kim Potter's handgun and Taser was 'key turning point' in deliberations for the ex-cop's manslaughter conviction
Kenneth Niemeyer
Sam McGinnis, senior special agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, holds the taser of Brooklyn Center police Officer Kim Potter as he testifies.
A juror who convicted Kim Potter told KARE that holding the ex-cop's gun and Taser was a "key turning point" in deliberations.
Potter was convicted of manslaughter charges in the shooting death of Daunte Wright on December 23.
Potter has said she intended to grab her Taser and not her gun when she shot Wright during a traffic stop.
A juror who convicted former Minnesota cop Kim Potter in the shooting death of Daunte Wright said holding Potter's gun and Taser was a "key turning point" in jury deliberations.
The juror, who is the first to comment publicly on the case, spoke to KARE on the condition that the TV station not release their name because of "the amount of public animosity involved with the case."
Potter was convicted on Thursday of first- and second-degree manslaughter charges after fatally shooting Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, during a traffic stop on April 11. The charges together carry a prison term of up to 25 years.
Body-camera footage played for the jury showed Potter, who later resigned from the force, shouting, "Taser! Taser! Taser!" before shooting Wright in the chest. Potter and her defense attorneys said she'd intended to grab her Taser instead of her gun, which was holstered on the opposite side of her body, when she shot Wright in Brooklyn Center, a suburb of Minneapolis.
The juror who spoke to KARE said that it was a significant factor during deliberations that Potter was a 26-year veteran of the department as well as a training officer.
"Because of her years of experience, we weren't really looking at this through a lens of 'what would a reasonable person do,' but rather, what would a reasonable officer do," the juror said.
Potter's gun weighs about twice as much as her Taser, an investigator tesified during the trial. The jury also noticed several differences in how the weapons are unholstered and fired when they handled them during deliberations, the juror told KARE.
"The Taser kind of feels like a mouse click whereas the trigger has some trigger draw weight," the juror said.
The 12-person jury convicted Potter of both charges after deliberating for 27 hours. The jury agreed that Potter was guilty on the second-degree manslaughter count, but the juror told KARE that two others got hung up on the first-degree count because they were worried about the consequences Potter would face.
Tthe juror added that deliberations got heated more than once, and that every juror cried at some point.
"It started to all hit us at once, the weight of this," the juror told KARE.
NOW WATCH: Former police officer Kim Potter sobs on the stand as she recalls fatally shooting Daunte Wright
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