A public-service announcement honoring the life of Botham Jean will be shown during the Super Bowl as part of a partnership between the Jean family’s foundation and the NFL, according to the family’s lawyer.
The 2-minute video was released online Wednesday and shows the “human cost of police brutality” from the Jean family’s perspective, said attorney Lee Merritt.
Jean, 26, was fatally shot in his own apartment in 2018 by former Dallas officer Amber Guyger, who was convicted of murder last year and is now serving a 10-year prison sentence.
Merritt said the video, produced by Jay-Z’s company Roc Nation and the NFL and narrated by the Jeans, didn’t come without its own controversy, noting the backlash Colin Kaepernick and other players faced when they protested police brutality on the field.
“Since then, the NFL has worked to see what they could do to try to right their wrongs,” Merritt said. “This isn't the compromise that I was hoping for. I was hoping that the players would be released to resume their on-the-field protest. But this is a step in the right direction.”
The Jean family was at first reluctant to work with the NFL to create the video for those reasons, he said.
But they were ultimately happy with how the PSA reflected Botham Jean’s life — and that it didn’t shy away from the fact that his life was unjustly cut short at the hands of a police officer, Merritt said.
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Originally Posted by Grey
