Amber Guyger (L), Botham Jean (R)
It’s rare in a murder case for the family of the victim to show mercy toward the convicted assailant.
Even though many people profess values of “turning the other cheek,” few of them, when confronted with the murder of their child, sibling, parent, or friend, ever reach a point when they can say, “I forgive you.”
Calls for “justice” for the person killed often become a rallying cry at trial and are mirrored by newspaper headlines. But “justice” is often synonymous with “revenge,” when there’s no room for considering the assailant as a human being with his own tortured story, who’s often sorry for what he did and will carry the burden the rest of his life.
That’s why what happened at the sentencing of former police office Amber Guyger last week in Texas was so surprising.
Guyger was found guilty of killing Botham Jean, her upstairs neighbor. After returning from a long shift on the job, Guyger parked on the wrong level of her complex and mistakenly entered Jean’s apartment rather than her own. Believing him to be an intruder, she shot him. (I wrote about this last week and predicted, because of how well she did testifying, that she would be convicted of manslaughter rather than murder. But I was wrong. What I didn’t know was that in her testimony, she admitted she intended to kill Jean when she shot him. Jurors read this as an admission of guilt.)
Texas is among a handful of southern states that permits the jury (as opposed to the judge alone) to determine what sentence the defendant should receive. In many cases, it makes sense for a jury to decide the sentence in keeping with what the community feels at the time, as opposed to mandatory-minimum sentencing thought up by legislators sometimes decades earlier. In this case, the prosecutor wanted Guyger to receive a 28-year sentence. The jury, however, decided 10 was enough and the judge agreed.
Sentencing included impromptu testimony given by the deceased’s 18-year-old brother, Brandt Jean. During a victim-impact statement, Brandt took the stand and detailed how he felt about his brother’s death and what he thought of the defendant. Surprisingly, he called for mercy and not revenge. He said he wanted the “best” for Guyger and, in a dramatic moment that left even the judge teary-eyed, asked if he could come down from the witness stand and hug Guyger in open court. He was permitted to do so, and the ensuing video became a news and social media sensation.
The jurors, who’d already decided that 10 years was a fair sentence, felt vindicated in their decision.
According to the Jean family lawyer, Brandt never intended to say anything at the sentencing but was moved at the last moment to state his position. It was unexpected, heartfelt, and showed a remarkable amount of courage to recognize the suffering of the defendant in the midst of his own suffering. (The judge, also, did something unusual. Following sentencing, she left the bench, hugged the defendant, and handed her a bible. I can’t imagine that ever happening in New York.)
Outside the courthouse, protestors denounced the 10-year sentence as too short and imposed only because the victim was black and the assailant white, but Brandt stuck to his position — putting Guyger in jail wouldn’t bring his brother back.
Out of the mouth of babes.
Hating the person who killed a sibling and carrying that hate forever doesn’t make anyone better or lessen the grief. Closure is important, and for those few with the compassion to forgive, perhaps closure comes quicker with forgiveness.
I have my own high-profile sentencing this week in the murder of “Junior” Lesandro Guzman Feliz. My client, Manuel Rivera, was 18 years old at the time, and although on the scene and pictured in a video of the event, he never intended that “Junior” be killed. His story and Junior’s intersected in one horrible moment of violence a little over one year ago. It will now result in each family losing their son as my client will be sentenced to a minimum of 20 years to life, potentially without the possibility of parole.
I had another murder case where my client’s mother and the victim’s mother were in court the same day, sitting just a bench apart. The victim’s mom wore a T-shirt with her son pictured on it. The two women didn’t know each other, but I introduced them. I didn’t know what would happen.
Within seconds, they stood, hugged, and cried, mourning the shared loss of their children.
Somehow it felt more humane, even in the midst of the tragedy, to do that rather than ignoring or hating each other forever.
Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.