A jury ordered former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger to pay $98 million after finding that she used excessive force in the fatal shooting of Botham Jean in his home six years ago.
The civil verdict and penalty for Guyger, 36, came five years after she was convicted of murder in the 2018 killing of Botham Jean and sentenced to a decade in prison.
Guyger did not attend the three-day trial, nor did she have a lawyer present, according to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth. The attorney who represented Guyger in her criminal trial told the outlet that she didn’t have the money to hire one.
The jury found that Guyger acted with “malice, willfulness, or callous and reckless indifference” to Jean’s safety and rights and awarded his family $60 million in punitive damages, a verdict form shows.
The jury awarded an additional $38 million in compensatory damages for mental anguish, loss of earnings and other claims, the document shows.
Jean’s family had sought $54 million in damages, according to NBC Dallas Fort-Worth.
After the verdict was announced, the family and their legal team called it a “powerful testament to Botham’s life and the profound injustice of his death.”
“This case laid bare critical issues of racial bias and police accountability that cannot be ignored,” they said in the statement. “Today’s verdict sends a clear message that law enforcement officers who commit crimes cannot be insulated from the consequences of their actions.”
In a federal complaint first filed in 2018, Jean’s family described Guyger’s actions on the night of Sept. 6, 2018, as “clearly excessive and clearly unreasonable.”
Guyger, who denied the allegations, was off-duty but in uniform when she returned to the Dallas apartment complex where she lived after working a 13-1/2 hour shift, prosecutors said at her criminal trial.
Guyger lived one floor below Jean, a 26-year-old accountant whom she’d never met, and mistakenly entered his apartment believing it was her own, authorities have said.
At the time, Jean was in his living room eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream. She ordered him to raise his hands, Guyger testified at her criminal trial, but he began moving toward her and yelling.
“I never wanted to take an innocent person’s life. I’m so sorry,” Guyger testified. “This is not about hate — it’s about being scared.”
Guyger is white. Jean, a native of St. Lucia, was Black.
