Public Safety | Daily Report

spotreporting/FlickrA mural of BART shooting victim Oscar Grant.

Johannes Mehserle, the former transit police officer who shot an unarmed* man on an Oakland BART platform, wants the judge to set him free pending appeal.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Perry already gave Mehserle a big break at sentencing, state prison records show.

After a trial moved out of Oakland on a change-of-venue motion, Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for killing BART passenger Oscar Grant, 22, on New Year’s Day.

The judge set the former officer’s total sentence at 24 months. On average, people convicted of manslaughter in California serve more than eight years in prison – four times Mehserle’s sentence.

That’s according to “Time Served on Prison Sentence,” a statistical report [PDF] by the state Department of Corrections. It details, by offense, how much prison time Californians who were paroled in 2009 had served on their felony convictions.

The data shows that Californians who haven’t killed anybody routinely do more prison time than the sentence Mehserle faces.

People convicted of armed robbery served 54.5 months – more than double Mehserle’s term. People convicted of selling controlled substances served 33 months.

Californians who spent 24 months in state prison – Mehserle's sentence – had been convicted of such crimes as assault and battery, escape, or possession of controlled substances for sale.

The data reflects only the primary felony for which a criminal was sentenced and not additional convictions that could enhance prison time.

The data also doesn’t distinguish between those convicted of involuntary manslaughter, as was Mehserle, and the more serious crime of voluntary manslaughter.

Mehserle was among police deployed to the Fruitvale BART station early on New Year’s Day after reports that a fight had broken out on a train. He shot BART passenger Grant in the back while Grant lay on the platform. Grant had been arrested on suspicion of resisting arrest, and officers said they were attempting to handcuff him when the shooting occurred. Passengers took video of the shooting on cell phone cameras.

Mehserle has been in jail since the incident. As the Oakland Tribune’s Tammerlin Drummond has noted, Mehserle is likely to serve only seven more months in prison. With credit for time served and good-time credits, his total time behind bars is likely to be about 17 months.

That’s slightly more than the prison time served by people convicted of second-degree burglary or petty theft.

At trial Mehserle said the shooting was a tragic accident – he had meant to zap Grant with a Taser, fearing that the suspect had a gun in his pocket. Grant didn’t have a gun.

Judge Perry said Mehserle showed “tons of remorse,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The judge also said he didn’t believe there was a racial component to the killing. Mehserle is white, and Grant was African American. By law, involuntary manslaughter is punishable by a prison term of two, three or four years. But the jury found that Mehserle had used a gun in commission of a felony -- an enhancement that might have added 10 years to his sentence. But defense lawyer Michael Rains argued that the use finding was inconsistent with the involuntary manslaughter verdict, and the judge struck that portion of the verdict, as the AP reported.

The hearing on Mehserle’s bail request is set for Friday.

Here, drawn from the corrections report, is time-served data for felons paroled in 2009, expressed in months behind bars:

*This corrects an earlier version that mistakenly said Grant was handcuffed. Officers were attempting to cuff him when the shooting occurred.