Dallas Morning News LaVendrick Smith and David Tarrant 9/20/2019
Indicting police officers on murder charges is rare. Even rarer is the officer convicted of murder.
But in recent years Dallas County has been bucking the national trend.
Since 2016, four Dallas-area police officers have been indicted on murder charges. The two who have been tried so far were both convicted and sent to prison.
A third, Amber Guyger, faces trial Monday in the Sept. 6, 2018, killing of Botham Jean, a 26-year-old accountant who was shot in his apartment.
The four-year Dallas police veteran, who has since been fired, was off duty but still in uniform when she confused his apartment for hers, mistook him for a burglar and shot him with her service weapon, she told authorities.
There is a tie that binds the cases of officers who have been convicted of murder or manslaughter charges, says Philip Stinson, a professor of criminology at Ohio's Bowling Green State University.
"In order to obtain a conviction," he said, "the facts of the incident have to be so bizarre that they can't be rationally explained at trial."
Despite the string of murder cases, Dallas County doesn't take charges against police lightly: Of the 50 officer-involved shooting cases put before a grand jury this year, only one resulted in an indictment.
More:
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2019/09/20/with-4-cops-in-3-years-indicted-on-murder-charges-dallas-county-bucks-national-trend/