Elie Honig Pans Kim Potter’s Testimony: ‘She Just Could Not Keep Herself Together’

Former police officer Kim Potter took the stand in her own defense on Friday and wept as she told jurors she mistakenly shot and killed Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, in April.

Potter shot Wright during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. Officers were attempting to arrest Wright on outstanding warrant. Wright was unarmed and began to resist arrest. During the struggle, Wright discharged her firearm into Wright after yelling “Taser” multiple times.

“We are struggling,” Potter recalled tearfully on the stand. “We’re trying to keep him from driving away. It just went chaotic. I remember yelling, ‘Taser! Taser! Taser!’ and nothing happened. And then he told me I shot him.”

Much of Potter’s testimony on direct examination involved a recounting of record of 26 years on the force. But CNN legal analyst Elie Honig was less than impressed with Potter’s testimony.

Potter testified she was issued a new taser less than a month before the shooting and that she took it out “on rare occasions,” but said she didn’t think she had actually ever used it.

“It’s not so much about her prior 26 years,” he said. “It’s about those crucial moments, and I think the prosecution did a good job of slowing it down and saying, ‘You had all this training. You reached for the wrong side. You grabbed an object which is very different…from a gun.'”

He continued, “Kim Potter kept on breaking down during her own testimony, during the cross examination, I mean she just could not keep herself together, and what that I think conveys to the jury is sort of the essence of the prosecutor’s case, which is panic. This is a person who got in a stressful situation, then, during the traffic stop, now on the stand and just freezes up and can’t control herself and can’t conduct herself appropriately.”

Honig concluded that were he prosecuting the case, he’d tell the jury during closing arguments, “I’m saying, You saw it, ladies and gentlemen. On the stand, you saw a person who’s not equipped to deal with a stressful situation, and that’s the negligence and recklessness that’s charged here.”

Watch above via CNN.