LOS ANGELES — A white former transit officer was sentenced to the minimum possible prison sentence of two years Friday for fatally shooting an unarmed black man on a California train platform, angering the victim’s family and friends, who demanded a harsher punishment.
The case against defendant Johannes Mehserle has provoked racial unrest, and police in Oakland, Calif., the scene of the killing, were on alert for more problems after a sentence that many thought was too light.
Wanda Johnson, the mother of victim Oscar Grant, shouted, “Oh my!” when Superior Court Judge Robert Perry issued the two-year sentence. She burst out of the courtroom saying, “He got nothing! He got nothing!”
Grant’s uncle, Bobby Cephus Johnson, said, “I do believe it’s a racist criminal justice system.”
Mehserle, 28, had faced a possible 14-year maximum term after being convicted of involuntary manslaughter. At the time of the shooting, Mehserle was a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer responding to a report of a fight.
In making his decision, Perry threw out a gun enhancement that could have added as much as 10 years in prison and said there was overwhelming evidence that it was an accidental shooting. “I did the best I could with this case,” Perry told the courtroom. The Associated Press
