(Reuters) -Former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor drew a reduced sentence of 57 months in prison - the maximum possible for manslaughter - after his murder conviction in the 2017 shooting death of an Australian woman was overturned last month.
The resentencing followed a Sept. 15 Minnesota Supreme Court ruling to vacate Noor's third-degree murder conviction and order that he be resentenced on a lesser charge of second-degree manslaughter in the death of Justine Ruszczyk, 40, who called police on the night of July 15, 2017, after hearing a woman scream near her home.
Lawyers for Noor, a 35-year-old Somali immigrant, had sought the minimum 41 months available under sentencing guidelines, saying he had been a "model prisoner."
Had Minnesota District Judge Kathryn Quaintance accepted the request, Noor, who has already served about 2-1/2 years of his original 12-1/2-year sentence, could have been released by early October 2022.
But Quaintance, who had imposed the original sentence in June 2019, rejected Noor's good-behavior prison record as grounds for a reduced sentence.
Instead, she noted that Noor fired “across the nose” of his partner in the squad car on a warm summer night when residents of a nearby house were entertaining on their porch. Noor fired his gun at Ruszczyk from the passenger seat as she approached the police vehicle, killing her.
“These factors of endangering the public make your crime of manslaughter appropriate for high end of the guidelines," the judge told Noor.
In 2019, a jury acquitted Noor of second-degree murder but convicted him of third-degree "depraved-mind murder" and second-degree manslaughter, and he was sentenced to 12-1/2 years in prison.
(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Chicago and Peter Szekely in New York; Editing by Howard Goller)
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