A former police officer in the southern US state of Texas has been sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison for fatally shooting Atatiana Jefferson, a Black woman, through the rear window of her home in 2019 after entering her property unannounced.
On Tuesday, a jury sentenced 38-year-old Aaron Dean to 11 years and 10 months in prison after convicting Dean of manslaughter last Thursday. He had faced a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
”Today’s guilty verdict is one small step to delivering justice for Atatiana Jefferson and her family,” US Congressman Marc Veasey, who represents a Texas district, said in a statement following the conviction last week.
“This verdict underscores the important work that needs to be done locally and nationally to ensure a tragedy like this one does not happen again.”
While police killings of unarmed people in the United States have drawn significant attention in recent years and spurred mass protests, the Texas trial led to a rare conviction of a police officer for killing someone who also had a gun.
Dean, a police officer in the Texas city of Fort Worth at the time of the incident, fatally shot Jefferson, 28, after a neighbour called a non-emergency police line stating that the front door to Jefferson’s home was open.
Jefferson had been playing video games with her eight-year-old nephew and had opened the door to let out smoke from cooking a hamburger.
