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Daunte Wright’s father, Arbuey Wright, fought back tears as he described feeling cheated and hurt. He said the judge had seemed to care more about Ms. Potter than about Mr. Wright and his family.

“They were so tied up into her feelings and what’s going on with her that they forgot about my son being killed,” he said. “We actually thought we were going to get a little justice.”

Ben Crump, a lawyer representing Mr. Wright’s family, said many people have been sentenced to longer terms in prison for selling marijuana.

One of Ms. Potter’s lawyers, Paul Engh, said he was grateful that Ms. Potter was “shown mercy.”

It is rare that police officers are convicted and sentenced to prison for killing people. And prosecutions are unusual in the few situations in which officers have claimed they thought they were firing their Tasers.

In 15 previous cases over the past two decades in which officers said they confused their weapons, three were convicted of a crime, including two officers who fired fatal shots. Johannes Mehserle, a transit officer who shot and killed Oscar Grant III at a train station in Oakland, Calif., in 2009, was sentenced to two years in prison. Robert Bates, a volunteer sheriff’s deputy in Tulsa, Okla., was sentenced to four years in prison after he shot and killed a man while meaning to fire his Taser.

Prosecutors in the office of Keith Ellison, the Minnesota attorney general, had suggested that they would ask Judge Chu to sentence Ms. Potter to a prison term beyond the standard sentencing range of 6.2 to 8.6 years, but in a new court filing this week they instead said that a sentence within that range would be appropriate.

Ms. Potter’s lawyers asked the judge to sentence Ms. Potter to probation, arguing that she would be a “walking target” in prison and that the prosecution’s sentencing request was “a political statement.”