Published 17 September 2021 at 07.26
Law & Justice. An inquired Somali police officer shot dead a 40-year-old newly engaged woman in Minneapolis in connection with an emergency. He was convicted of murder – but now the sentence is being overturned, and the Somali may be free later this year, reports CBC News.
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The act took place in Minneapolis – in the same city as a couple of years later the overdosing criminal African American George Floyd died in connection with a police intervention.
On the previous occasion, however, the roles were reversed. It was a newly graduated black police officer, Mohamed Noor, who shot dead a white 40-year-old woman from Australia – Justine Damond, who was engaged and would soon marry an American man.
The media and the judiciary are very diverse handling of the two different cases has received attention.
It was late in the evening on July 15, 2017 that Justine Damond alerted the police that there was a suspected sexual assault against a woman. When Mohamed Noor and his colleague arrived at the scene, Damond approached their police car, whereupon the Somali immediately shot her dead through the window.
During his short time as a police officer, Mohamed Noor had made three previous reports, including for harassing a woman during her service.
The Somali became a police officer in 2015 in connection with a “diversity effort” to increase the number of non-white police officers in the Minneapolis police force.
According to the Minneapolis-based newspaper Star Tribune, Noor had completed a seven-month “quick training” for the police profession. An education that is formally just another way of recruiting police officers, but which according to the same newspaper is in practice considered a way to quickly “recruit diversity to the police force” in many suburban police stations in the USA.
Mohamed Noor had before The assassination was hailed by politicians, such as Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, as the first Somali police in the area.
He was later sentenced to 12.5 years in prison for the fatal shooting. However, Somalia's lawyers have maintained that he only “acted as he was trained to act”.
But now the Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that it was wrong to convict Mohamed Noor of third-degree murder. The trial will therefore be resumed and the Somali prosecuted for manslaughter instead.
Since he has already served 28 months of the sentence, and he can expect a four-year prison sentence for manslaughter, Mohamed Noor can be released as early as the end of 2021 , writes CBC News.