The Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed the third-degree murder conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor, who fatally shot a 911 caller four years ago.

Noor was also convicted of second-degree manslaughter in the death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond on July 15, 2017, and that verdict still stands.

The former officer will be re-sentenced for the manslaughter conviction alone, as opposed to the 12 1/2-year penalty handed down to him in 2019 for murder.

Noor is now looking at a sentence of between 41 months to 57 months for that lesser conviction, a Hennepin County Attorney’s Office spokeswoman said.

If he’s hit with a four-year manslaughter term, the former officer should be eligible for release after doing two-thirds of that time and walk free by late this year, Noor’s appellate lawyer Peter Wold said.

Noor has been behind bars since he was convicted on April 30, 2019.

“I talked to Mo this morning. It’s relief, great relief,” Wold told NBC News. “He has a young son and it’s time they get back together.”

The high court ruled that prosecutors did not prove that Noor had acted with a “depraved mind, without regard for human life,” which would be needed for the third-degree murder conviction….

The chief justice said the court and prosecutors agree that “Noor’s decision to shoot a deadly weapon simply because he was startled was disproportionate and unreasonable.”

“Noor’s conduct is especially troubling given the trust that citizens should be able to place in our peace officers,” Gildea wrote. “But the tragic circumstances of this case do not change the fact that Noor’s conduct was directed with particularity toward Ruszczyk.”

The city of Minneapolis agreed to a $20 million settlement with the woman’s family. She was a dual citizen of the United States and Australia.

Mohamed Noor is a Somali Muslim, the first Somali Muslim on the Minneapolis police force. In 2016, Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges expressed her excitement about that fact: “I want to take a moment to recognize Officer Mohamed Noor, the newest Somali officer in the Minneapolis Police Department. Officer Noor has been assigned to the 5th Precinct, where his arrival has been highly celebrated, particularly by the Somali community in and around Karmel Mall.”

Hodges wasn’t excited because Mohamed Noor had the skills necessary to become a fine police officer. She was only excited because he represented a religious and ethnic group that she was anxious to court. And it became increasingly clear — as we learned about Mohamed Noor’s nervousness and jumpiness and lack of respect for women, and from his own account of events that he relayed to friends (that he was “startled” and reacted by opening fire) — that Mohamed Noor was not cut out to be a policeman. He did not have the temperament for it, and if he hadn’t killed Justine Ruszczyk Damond, he would likely have done something similar at some point.

Mohamed Noor was not competent to be a police officer. If he had not been a Somali and a Muslim, he never would have been on the force at all. Identity politics kills. If there was any lesson to be drawn from the killing of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, that was it. The city of Minneapolis was so eager to have a Somali Muslim police officer on the force that it hired a man who had been found incompetent to hold the job. Even worse, Minneapolis officials did not fire him even when he proved that he was indeed unfit to be a cop.

Now he will be freed earlier than mandated by his already light initial sentence. The injustices just pile higher and higher.