They said the police were attempting to write the sequel to a now
well-known franchise:
In cases involving police and unarmed black men, the dead victims are usually portrayed as suspect or inherently criminal characters, people bound for an early demise.
But experts say the trial illuminates a well-documented truth about American justice. Image —
how the victim’s and the defendant’s characters are perceived based on their actions and
appearance — is often as important as evidence.
“Botham Jean was a near perfect person of color,” said Benjamin Crump, a lawyer representing Jean’s family in a pending wrongful death suit against Guyger and the City of Dallas. “He was. And this officer, anything but. What this case shows is both how much that mattered and the fundamental problem with that. You shouldn’t have to be a perfect person of color to get justice in America. You really should not.”
In capital cases, it’s not the details of the crime or race of the accused killer that is most predictive of the outcome, said Samuel R. Sommers, a social psychologist and the chair of the psychology department at Tufts University. It’s the race of the victim. Defendants charged with killing white people, particularly women, are
more likely to be sentenced to death. Death penalty sentencing
disparities are most extreme when
black men are accused of raping and murdering white women.
“People like to think of the legal system as a cut and dried thing and the process dominated by cold and dispassionate reason evenly applied,” said Sommers, who studies race, perception and how this shapes application of the law. “But, there’s a human element to the law and anyone who has tried or been to a jury trial can tell you that plays a role as big as — sometimes, perhaps even bigger — than the law.”
Days after the shooting, police officers, police union representatives and people with connections to Guyger also made sure that local reporters became aware of search warrants for Jean’s apartment which indicated that police anticipated they would find drugs inside, Crump said. The search found a small amount of marijuana in Jean’s apartment. But the results of drug and alcohol tests run on Guyger
remained out of public view until the trial.
During that same pretrial stretch, Jean’s family sought to tell a more complete storyofwho Jean was and, at times, they shared in great detail the
pain caused by the murder of a beloved son, brother and friend.
They spoke of Jean, who was 26, using marijuana to treat ADHD.
“I say this with care because so many people’s lives have been turned upside down by the unpunished deaths of people of color after contact with police,” Sommers said. “But there is a certain irony here that what many people perceive as justice in this case also highlights the sort of biased lens applied to a woman who engaged in sexual banter, and a [extramarital] relationship revealing her ‘character,’ being worthy of some kind of moral sanction.”
Police officer convictions after shootings remain exceedingly rare,
according to a database maintained by researchers at Bowling Green State University.
“Research has always made it clear that juries like stories,” Sommers said. “The jury uses stories to think through the facts at hand. So, slivers of who these people are, what the jurors think they can tell shape the stories we construct and believe. In a courtroom, the best narrative wins.”
“The prosecutors in this case were willing to do something so many, in so many other cities and cases where black people have died, have just refused to do,” Crump said.
“They were willing to rip the halo off of Amber Guyger’s head, [one] that’s just automatically affixed to the heads of police officers, deserved or not.” bbm
Guyger conviction shows how image, notions of character can influence trials
