Former police officer Amber Guyger’s hopes of going home early from her ten-year bid for killing Botham Jean in 2018 as he sat in his living room eating ice cream have been crushed. The former police officer killed Jean and claimed she thought she was entering her own apartment when she allegedly mistook Jean for an intruder and then shot and killed him. She was sentenced in 2019 to 10 years in prison, but her defense attorneys were attempting to get her murder conviction tossed in a Dallas, Texas appeals court.
On Aug. 5 the court upheld the murder conviction and a panel of three state judges ruled that a Dallas County jury had sufficient evidence to convict Guyger of murder in the fatal shooting of the 26-year-old accountant. The decision by the 5th Texas Court of Appeals in Dallas means Guyger will continue to serve her 10-year prison bid.
According to the Associated Press, Guyger’s appeal hung on the claim that her mistaking Jean’s apartment for her own was reasonable, and therefore, so too was the shooting. Her lawyer asked the appeals court to acquit her of murder or substitute it with a conviction for criminally negligent homicide, which carries a lesser sentence. Dallas County prosecutors countered that the error was not reasonable, that Guyger acknowledged intending to kill Jean, and that “murder is a result-oriented offense.”
The court’s chief justice, Robert D. Burns III, and Justices Lana Myers and Robbie Partida-Kipness concurred with prosecutors, disagreeing that Guyger’s belief that deadly force was needed was reasonable. In a 23-page opinion, the justices also disagreed that the evidence supported a conviction of criminally negligent homicide rather than murder, and they pointed to Guyger’s own testimony that she intended to kill.
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