What Would Tossing Out Amber Guyger's Conviction Do To Dallas?

DALLAS —Remember the environment in 2019 when Amber Guyger was convicted of murder by a jury of her peers?

That's not the world we're living in today.

Guyger maintained throughout her 2019 trial that she thought she was entering her own apartment when she fatally shot Botham Jean on Sept. 6, 2018 in his home on the floor above hers. She opened fire and killed Jean, who was sitting on his couch eating ice cream.

Her lawyer, Michael Mowla, now seeks to have Guyger's murder charge downgraded to "criminally negligent homicide," which would drastically reduce the prison term she was handed by jurors after her 2019 trial. The lesser charge carries a maximum prison sentence of two years.

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If the appellate court who heard her appeal yesterday tosses out the verdict and the 10-year sentence that goes along with it, their decision could be the social equivalent of having stitches bursting wide open to bleed anew.

Since Guyger's conviction, the city — and the whole country — has witnessed the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a scorching summer of Black Lives Matter unrest and a presidential election rife with racial overtones, from Confederate monuments to challenges of vote counts in the so-called "urban" centers of Philadelphia and Atlanta.

Some consider the concerns raised about voting irregularities in those communities with large minority populations utterly legitimate. For others, they're a dog whistle intended to remind the disenfranchised that there are still two classes of citizens. And that's the point.

Everything is racially charged right now, and America is more uncomfortably "woke" than at any moment since the Civil Rights riots of the 1960s. If racial tension could be picked up by a Geiger counter, the whole nation would appear radioactive.

Unfortunately, there is no Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to call for tolerance on both sides. And many of the 70 million-plus voters who supported former President Trump have tuned out his successor, Joe Biden, and his multi-racial Vice President, Kamala Harris.

So we sit. And we wait to see what the appellate court will decide in the next two to three months. Should they find reason to vacate Guyger's original charge and conviction, Dallasites will once again wince and grit their teeth to see how our community responds.

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