The former white Dallas police officer convicted of killing a Black man in his apartment that she mistook for her own was granted parole Thursday after serving seven years of her 10-year sentence.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Parole, which is appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, rejected Amber Guyger's initial parole request in 2024 but approved her case over the objections of the victim's family the first time she was eligible to return.
Guyger was convicted
of murder in the 2018 killing of Botham Jean, an accountant from the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia, who had been eating a bowl of ice cream when Guyger entered his home and shot him.
The shooting drew widespread attention because of the strange circumstances and because it was one in a string of shootings of Black men by white police officers. Guyger’s sentencing hearing also included a stunning courtroom scene when Jean’s brother and the Black judge presiding over the case embraced the sobbing officer.
During her murder trial, Guyger said that after a long shift at work and still in uniform, she walked up to Jean’s apartment — which was on the fourth floor, directly above hers on the third — and found the door unlocked. She said she thought the apartment was her own and that Jean was an intruder when she drew her service weapon and entered.
Civil rights attorney Lee Merritt said Jean's family “strongly opposed this parole.”
“They stood up again and again to ask that the full sentence be served. A 10-year sentence was already a fraction of what was lost. Releasing Ms. Guyger after seven years makes that loss feel even smaller in the eyes of the system. It is not smaller,” Merritt said.
In 2024, a jury awarded Jean’s family nearly $100 million in a federal civil trial.
In granting her release, the board said it reviewed a “plethora” of information in her case.
The board said Guyger's record did not include a documented pattern of violent or assaultive arrests or convictions, and showed she has participated and completed programs in her prison treatment plan to get and keep a job when she is released. It said she also “maintained a satisfactory institutional adjustment.”
The board said the state prison system will determine when she is released. Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.
