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There Is Such a Thing as a Bad Boy
He was a good boy, look at the pictures his family wants you to see. Don’t pay any attention to his criminal history, after all, he was a good boy. Our community lost a valuable young man.
Daunte Wright lost his life resisting arrest. A traffic stop for expired tags, signaling a left turn, and making a right turn, and then the infamous Minnesota statute; air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. The media loves the air freshener angle.
Daunte Wright has an interesting criminal history that belies his lovely family photos. The mother of Caleb Livingston, Jennifer Le May, has a different view of Duante Wright.
Wright shot Caleb Livingston in the frontal part of his head and left him to die at a Minneapolis gas station in May 2019.
Caleb now suffers from a traumatic brain injury, respiratory arrest, and is permanently disabled.
Moreover, he is bound to a wheelchair, lost his speaking ability, and requires 24/7 care.
Not only the shooting cases, but the late Wright also shares several brushes with the law including firearm offenses, burglary, and assault.
However, his violent way of life is less talked about in the media, complained by Jennifer LeMay, Caleb’s mother.
She also revealed that Potter’s recent sentencing proves justice but not for Wright who was never put to the real justice for the crimes that he committed.
Daunte Wright was a very busy young man.
Daunte Wright had an open warrant for his arrest related to many charges at the time of his death.
He was being pursued by the police for the charges of aggravated armed robbery, for failure to appear in court.
In addition to those, he had also fled from officers and possessed a gun without a permit during an encounter with Minneapolis police in June.
Daunte Wright wasn’t resisting arrest to avoid a traffic cite. Listening to the platitudes from the prosecutors on finding justice for Daunte Wright with the conviction of Officer Kim Potter for his death seems rather empty. One has to wonder if they worked as hard to find justice for Caleb Livingston, and if they had, Mr. Wright might still be alive today.
When the Daunte Wright family gets their big settlement check from the city Jennifer LeMay may want to hire her own attorney to file a civil suit against Daunte Wright’s estate. After all her son requires 24/7 medical care.
Published in Law
Is this the officer who grabbed her pistol thinking it was her taser?
Yes
Thank you. I forget where (maybe here) I said I don’t mourn the passing of Wright — we’re all better off with him dead *including* his mom.
At the same time, I can’t get huffy about Alec baldwin but let this officer off the hook. How do you wind up with so very little range time that you cannot tell just by feel which one you’ve drawn? Nevermind standard setup. She was just plain unfamiliar with her weapon, and should never have been on a shift.
I agree that LeMay is the real injured party here.
Scumbags who die ahead of schedule are still scumbags. The sanctification of victimizers who become victims [some are, some aren’t] is profoundly dishonest.
I don’t expect any grieving mother to say, ‘well sure, he had it coming,’ but I wish our culture would stop making tragedy out of mere misfortune.
Yes.
My understanding is that Wright’s family has already received their settlement and have several lawsuits pending against his estate. Caleb was not Wright’s only victim.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/daunte-wright-estate-third-lawsuit-gunpoint-choking-woman-robbery
I hope they all win their cases against Wright’s estate.
Eh, this is why police officers don’t get to decide things. Let’s hope that never changes.
There was terrible negligence in shooting him. It’s very clear, there is no doubt. He was killed when the killer meant to not kill him. Deadly force was used through her negligence. It was a mistake.
Whatever he did in the past does not absolve her from her mistake which wrongly took his life. Outstanding warrants are not guilt, he was still legally innocent.
You might not like the verdict, but it was clearly correct. When you wield deadly force wrongfully, you don’t get to say “oops, my bad,” as though you had spilled coffee on someone.
And she was the trainer for another officer that day. I guess he learned a lot more than he expected.
This post does not concern the Kim Potter verdict. Duante Wright had shot two different individuals before his own death during a traffic stop. He put a gun against a woman’s head to steal her rent money, and when the gun threat didn’t work he attempted to strangle her.
The real question is why wasn’t he prosecuted for these crimes.
I would have handled the traffic stop differently, and Duante Wright would have never been able to get back into the car. He wants to wrestle to prevent his arrest. I get to take the next step-up in the force continuum pyramid. Short straight punches to the gut and head until I can get the cuffs on his wrists. His booking photo would have left people believing he had been in a hockey fight, but that’s not what this post is about.
I’ve never seen one of those tasers. How different or similar are they in the hand to a firearm? From the photos it looks very similar. I believe the police officer made an honest mistake, and I hope the sentence is very light, but it seems like the designers of the tasers bear some fault in that they designed them to close to a gun. There should have been some fool proof distinguishing feature designed in.
Not only that, this was after the woman had put him up for the night in her apartment. The classical Greeks regarded hospitality as a moral duty, and any violation of its rules (by host or guest) as the gravest of sins (or impiety, as the Greeks termed such an offense.)
Another important question: Why do Keith Ellison and such people treat Duante Wright and his ilk as innocent martyrs? I think we know the answer full well, but it bears repeated attention.
Then it is meaningless.
Unless you’re saying that it’s okay to kill people through negligence as long as they are
badpeople you don’t like.Write your own post, and that’s not what I’m saying. He was on the road to oblivion, that doesn’t excuse Officer Potter, and it doesn’t excuse the prosecutor’s that didn’t charge Wright, nor the failure to allow him to run wild by granting a stone cold shooter bail.
I do, from time to time. Wright would not be in the news at all were he not negligently killed. Whatever happened in prior cases is irrelevant and of no interest at all. The cop was wrong, there’s nothing else to say. She seemed to take the verdict with appropriate grace. I admire that. That seems somewhat rare nowadays.
I think recent history proves that wrong. Any “person of color” shot and/or killed by a white cop will be in the news, and if it’s not actual negligence – or racism or whatever they can come up with – they’ll act like it was anyway. It’s what they do, these days.
Did you miss the Kyle Rittenhouse case? The media was happy to act like and let people continue to believe that he shot three unarmed black men.
We have a weekend deputy working in the office. He has a taser. I think it’s mostly rectangular. He also says you don’t want to get tased.
The “body” of a taser is definitely different, but you wouldn’t be holding it by the “body” while drawing or using it. I’m not sure how much difference you can tell from the grip.
I think his may be an older model.
This is from the trial:
To me it all points to her being insufficiently familiar with her gear. There is *no way* to mistake these even just by feel without being utterly incompetent in the application of force.
As in the OP, I do not weep for the perp’s death, but I cannot tolerate this level of incompetence in the people we pay to use violence against us on our behalf.
The point of Doug’s post is that the victims of dindunuffin demographic crime are rarely treated to justice commensurate to the offense. Anecdata aside, the black crime problem is aided and abetted by leftist media whores. It’s not doing any good for black folks either in the long run, but the specific victims of individual crimes receive only (again, leaving outliers to lie out) a Potemkin justice.
I’m glad this creep is dead. I’m also glad that Potter was found guilty of manslaughter.
Are we sure those were the models she had on her? I’ve seen Taser models that didn’t have the yellow front, they were all gray/black like a pistol. I’m also not so sure it would be all that obvious what something weighs when you’re struggling with a suspect.
OFF-TOPIC:
Yes, that is the model she carried. That is also the pistol she carried. As I said, that image was used in the trial (not sure about the text explaining the differences). So yes, we are sure.
Also, I do give weight (so to speak) to the effect of stress and adrenaline in a rapidly escalating confrontation. Even so, I feel that she should have know the difference just by feel. If she was so reduced in capacity that *nothing* alerted her (heft and balance, grip size and shape, obvious appearance, thumbology, and holster on the other side of the belt (FFS)) to the fact that she had drawn the wrong weapon, then this just makes my point.
There’s gotta be more to this story, and the city (or whatever) should answer for putting this obviously incapable officer on the front line.
Now where does Mrs. LeMay go for her justice?
It may be that the only way for the families of Wright’s victims to get any “justice” will be because of the city/police department putting a lot of money into Wright’s estate, which the families of his victims will hopefully take right back. How sad.
I would hope (IANAL) that there is an intermediate route, in which the city (the taxpayers) can be added to the suit. This whole thing sucks, and the OP has identified the enduring problem, rather than focus on the obvious but simple issue about Potter.
I am not going to defend the Woman who thought she had a place in a melee with a criminal. Women shouldn’t be Police.
It might be counter intuitive, but this problem might be solved by the elimination of all tasers and all non-lethal means of restraint. If criminal resists arrest a rapid, understood, and established escalation to deadly force might eliminate the criminal’s inclination to fight or flight.
I prefer to see a few deaths of violent criminals by misadventure as an encouragement for the rest than the constant harangue about the high value of criminal lives when interacting with Law enforcement.
I think you are completely wrong here. For one, women are better able to address certain parts of policing like undercover work and intimate searches on female suspects. As long as consistant fitness standards are enforced, we can have female police. It’s not like male officers are all built like linebackers or MMA fighters. Much like a smaller male officer, female cop need to be realistic and preferably train in a grappling / joint lock based martial art like judo or BJJ. (We really should give police paid time on the mat as well as on the range.)
Tasers are very useful when dealing with insane or intoxicated suspects . These people will not be deterred by a known escalation to deadly force because their minds are running 2 + 2 = corndogs. You are also going to see much more suicide by cop.
I want the officer who just confused me with a wanted criminal to have a non-lethal option. Accidental tasing or pepper spraying beats getting ventilated.
Isn’t it pretty much irrelevant unless you start fighting?
Daunte Wright didn’t get “ventilated” because of a traffic stop, or because he had warrants out, or even because of his past criminal acts. It was his CURRENT acts, fighting with a cop, that got him killed.
Agree 100%.