Botham Jean
An off-duty police officer in Dallas, Amber R. Guyger, said she came home from work, and, believing she had found an intruder inside her apartment, shot the man inside. The officer, who is white, was in the wrong apartment. And the man she shot was not an intruder, but her neighbor, Botham Shem Jean, a 26-year-old black accountant. A Dallas County jury found Ms. Guyger, 31, guilty of murder, choosing the more serious conviction over a lesser option of manslaughter.
The case did not fit into the familiar narratives of police killings in which officers fired their weapons on duty. But it was widely viewed as a test for whether there was anywhere in America where black men could be safe, if not in their own homes. With Ms. Guyger’s tearful testimony that she was afraid for her life when she saw a silhouetted figure in the darkened living room, the guilty verdict was seen by many activists as a step toward police accountability, and a rebuke of the stereotype that black men are inherently scary.