Texas Appeals Court Upholds Amber Guyger’s 10-Year Prison Sentence for Killing Botham Jean
In this file photo dated September 27, 2019, fired Dallas police officer Amber Guyger gets emotional as she testifies in her Dallas murder trial. A Texas appeals court has upheld the murder conviction against Guyger, who was sentenced to jail for fatally shooting her neighbor in his home. A panel of three state judges ruled Thursday, August 5, 2021 that a Dallas County jury had sufficient evidence to convict Guyger of the murder in the 2018 shooting of Botham Jean. (Tom Fox / The Dallas Morning News via AP, Pool, File)
Amber Guyger will continue serving her 10-year sentence after a Texas appeals court upheld her 2018 conviction for the murder of Botham Jean at his own home.
According to the Dallas Morning News, the former Dallas police officer and her lawyers were hoping the court would instead convict her of negligent homicide – a charge that comes with a maximum sentence of just two years in prison.
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Guyger testified that she mistakenly entered Jean’s apartment the night of the shooting because she was tired after a long shift. Jean, a 26-year-old accountant, was sitting on his couch eating ice cream when Guyger walked into the apartment and killed him.
Her appeal argued that it was reasonable for Guyger to use lethal force for self-defense because she believed she was in her own apartment and Jean was an intruder.
The Fifth District Court of Appeals contradicted this premise.
From the morning news:
The judges also disagreed that evidence supported a conviction of negligent homicide rather than murder, and they pointed to Guyger’s own testimony that she wanted to kill.
“The fact that she was wrong about Jean’s status as a resident of his own apartment or as a burglar in hers does not change her state of mind from willful or knowingly to criminally negligent,” wrote the judges. “We refuse to rely on Guyger’s misjudgment of the circumstances that led to their false beliefs as a basis for reforming the jury’s judgment in the face of direct evidence of their intention to kill.”
It’s good to see that the appeals court recognized that Guyger’s story was wrong when it happened and still doesn’t fit together today. The Morning News notes that Guyger said during the trial that she knew she could have approached the situation very differently instead of just bursting in and shooting this man if she was really worried that her apartment was being broken into.
The story goes on
But she didn’t, and now she’s paying the price for taking the life of an innocent man. It should be so.
According to Morning News, Guyger and her attorneys can appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court. The newspaper notes that this court is far more conservative than the Fifth District.
We can only hope that when Guyger tries to appeal to these judges, he has as much sense to keep them in control as the others.
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