Two of the people who sat on the jury that convicted and sentenced former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger, sat down with ABC News and Good Morning America to open up about “one of the hardest things” they’ve ever had to do.
In the interview, the jurors, identified by the court as Juror 21 (a white man) and juror 34 (a black woman), revealed how they came to decide Guyger’s fate.
The jurors revealed that it was after hearing about Botham Jean’s remarkably forgiving nature, they couldn’t bring themselves to sentence Guyger to the full 28 years the prosecutors had asked for.
“There was a few of us crying, and I really started crying, and I was listening to some people say they agreed with 28,” Juror 21 said. “I asked for a lighter sentence.”
“I’m a be honest and true,” Juror 34 said, “I was like, ‘I can’t give her 28 years.'”
Jean, a 26-year-old black man, died after his neighbor, Guyger, a 31-year-old white woman mistakenly entered his apartment, thinking it was her own, and fatally shot him.
According to ABC News, Guyger’s defense attorneys argued she didn’t kill Jean out of hate, but rather she made a series of “horrible mistakes” that caused her to “pull that trigger in an instant, an instant she’ll have to live with the rest of her life.”
The former officer testified that she was “scared to death” because she thought her black neighbor was an intruder, and cried on the witness stand telling the court she wished he was the one with the gun that killed her.
Many believe the verdict itself was too lenient. But the two jurors contend they couldn’t bring themselves to sentence Guyger to anything harsher. After deliberating for a little over an hour on Wednesday, the 12-member panel unanimously agreed to sentence Guyger to serve 10 years in prison.
The black woman, Juror 34, told ABC News, “I know a lot of people are not happy about the 10 years, but I felt like … You can’t compare this case to any of those other officers killing unarmed black men.”
The jurors also discussed feeling like 28 years would have been a sentence even Jean himself would disagree with.
“There’s no way we could ever know what he would want,” Juror 21, a white man, said in an interview that aired Friday morning. “But I think we all had to make a decision that we could live with and that our conscience could be sound with.”
“One thing that Botham can teach us all is that we should all love each other instead of hate each other,” the woman told ABC. “And I honestly think that if Botham would have just got shot and not killed, I think he would have forgiven Amber Guyger.”
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