Who Killed Daunte Wright?

Bob Yentzer

September 2025

The Daunte Wright story is my vehicle for raising concerns about the distribution of accountability in the criminal justice system. If you are unfamiliar with this story of a 20 year old black man who was killed by the police one year after George Floyd, click here.

The proximate cause of Daunte Wright's death was a bullet to the chest. When Wright attempted to escape arrest on April 11, 2021, officer Kim Potter sought to tase him, but by mistake pulled-out her handgun.

As the proximate actor in Wright's death, justice required that Potter be held accountable. So, eight months later, she was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to prison.

However, the justice of Potter's conviction was questioned by two injustices: 1) the ultimate cause of the crime escaped accountability, and 2) selective prosecution.

The Ultimate Cause Evades Liability

Ultimate cause refers to the necessary preconditions for a crime to occur. Specifically, Wright's murder can be traced back to a single binary decision that left him exposed to encounters with the police. Had the opposite decision been made, it would have been impossible for Kim Potter and Daunte Wright to cross paths on that day. The crime could not have occurred.

The Details

Wright was killed during a routine traffic stop. He was driving a car with expired tags. When he couldn't produce a valid driver's license or insurance, the cops ran his name through a records check. It turned up an arrest warrant for skipping a hearing on a firearms charge.

The firearms charge is the prologue to the ultimate cause of Wright's death.

On June 30, 2020, Wright was arrested for illegal possession of a Ruger .45 and fleeing from police. The charge was classified as a Gross Misdemeanor. The crime occurred in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

So, at the bail hearing, the presiding judge had to decide whether Wright would be granted pre-trial release or suffer pre-trial detention.

Ordinarily, an adult charged with a misdemeanor would be released on bail. However, detention is the cardinal rule when the defendant's rap-sheet indicates that his release would pose a significant threat to the community. Wright's rap sheet looked like this:

2017 FELONY BURGLARY. At age 16, he was charged with felony 1st degree burglary of a residential dwelling. The owner was home when Wright entered through a bathroom window, so in effect, he had committed a home invasion. Even though he plead guilty to a lesser charge of trespassing, an alarming psych-evaluation swayed the judge to order a short stint at Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center.

2019 MISDEMEANORS. Possession/sale of a small amount of marijuana and disorderly conduct.

2019 FELONY ROBBERY. In December, Daunte Wright was charged with first-degree aggravated robbery. Along with a buddy, he held a woman at gunpoint, choked her, reached into her clothes, and threatened to shoot her if she didn’t hand over the $820. He was released, conditionally, on reduced bail of $40,000.

So, in July 2020 a Minneapolis judge had to decide whether the most recent offense - a firearms misdemeanor - warrants pretrial release, or not.

In just about any court outside of Minnesota, that kind of rap-sheet would almost guarantee pre-trial detention for a weapons charge, or at least, geographical confinement with an ankle monitor. For example, in Federal District Courts, a case like Wright's results in confinement 85% of the time.

But our Minnesota magistrate discounted the warning signs and released Wright on bail (without ankle monitor).

Once free of external constraint, he proceeded to live up to the reputation portrayed on the rap-sheet, that is, a danger to others and himself. Specifically, from his release in July 2020 to the encounter with Kim Potter in April 2021, he...

• induced an unidentified woman to pursue a restraining order against him.

• skipped a court date, which instigated a warrant for his immediate arrest.

• failed to produce a valid driver's license during the doomsday traffic stop, which triggered the records search that turned up the fateful arrest warrant.

• was accused of shooting Joshua Hodges during a car-jacking two weeks before the encounter with Kim Potter. (Nobody has been arrested).

So, the ultimate cause of Wright's demise was the judge's reckless failure to require pretrial detention.

Had he done so, Wright would have lived to attend his trial for aggravated robbery; Kim Potter would still have a career; and perhaps Joshua Hodges would not have a bullet in his leg.

"Reckless disregard of the risks" was the legal reason Potter was imprisoned for 1st degree manslaughter. The magistrate in the firearms case exhibited the same "reckless disregard of the risks" when he unleashed a known gunslinger on the public. But the judge went scot-free, never held accountable in any way for the tragedies that ensued.

The judge's ability to evade responsibility is not just a perquisite of "qualified immunity," but also of lavish judicial discretion. The law gives judges a lot of latitude to depart from official guidelines, in other words, to gamble with public safety.

Selective Prosecution of Kim Potter

Prosecutorial Overreach

Aside from the mercenary pill-mill doctors that emerged during the Opioid crisis, physicians who mistakenly kill a patient are (almost) never charged with manslaughter.

That's because doctors are held accountable in civil court where generous monetary settlements curb the appetite to obtain justice through criminal prosecution. Retributive justice is unnecessary.

However, public officials, including Kim Potter, cannot be sued in civil court. They enjoy "qualified immunity." Therefore, the only option for accountability is retributive justice, i.e., criminal prosecution.

And indeed, Potter's chief prosecutor, Attorney General Ellison, pursued retributive justice with a vengeance. In the wake of George Floyd, it was expedient to "send a message" condemning police brutality. A charge of 2nd degree manslaughter was not good enough, so he contrived a 1st degree charge as well. The prosecution insisted that Potter was reckless, not merely negligent.

Potter was convicted on both counts. But at the time of sentencing Judge Regina Chu saw the recklessness charge for what it was: an egregious case of prosecutorial overreach. So she rejected Ellison's call for seven years in prison, and sentenced Potter to just two years.

(By contrast, the official who did satisfy the legal standard for "recklessness" was the Minneapolis judge who, fully aware of the dire risks to the public, unleashed a certified miscreant).

Prosecutorial Hypocrisy.

The justice system is corrupted by the fact that prosecutors protect their peers from the same retributive justice they so pompously inflict on subordinate officials, like Potter.

Prosecutors are almost never charged, let alone imprisoned, for their felonious misconduct while in office. Therefore, not only do they enjoy immunity from civil suits, but from criminal liability as well. So unlike their underlings, they are thoroughly unaccountable for on-the-job malfeasance.

This malfeasance refers to prosecutors' complicity in the wrongful conviction of innocent persons. When this results in a person's incarceration or even execution, the prosecutor is certainly eligible for a charge of false imprisonment or manslaughter. But it (almost) never happens.

In a review of 2000 cases where prosecutorial misconduct contributed to wrongful convictions not a single prosecutor was subject to criminal penalty - not even when the death sentence was carried out. (A more recent study was able to identify two prosecutions).

For example, in 2015 the State Bar of Texas accused prosecutor John H. Jackson of committing the same crime for which Kim Potter was convicted, 1st degree manslaughter. Jackson had intentionally withheld exculpatory information that led to the wrongful conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham.

While Potter made a lethal choice by mistake, and was convicted of a felony, Jackson did it intentionally and never suffered an iota of punishment, not even disbarment.