How pretrial publicity could affect case against Fort Worth officer in shooting
National attention surrounding a Fort Worth police officer who shot a woman in her own home, and the flurry of comments from public officials that followed, may impact the potential trial, experts say.
Activists and leaders across the country called for justice for Atatiana Jefferson and condemned the actions of officer Aaron Dean, who resigned from the Fort Worth Police Department and has been charged with murder.
In the days after Dean shot Jefferson on Oct. 12, their names trended nationally on Twitter.
Locally, Mayor Betsy Price said Jefferson was “taken from her family in circumstances that are truly unthinkable.”
Police Chief Ed Kraus said Dean’s actions did not reflect the Fort Worth Police Department and there was “absolutely no excuse for this incident.”
U.S. Rep Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, publicly called for Dean’s arrest on Twitter before Dean was taken into custody, saying “he should be behind bars!”
Activist Shaun King, who has 1.1 million Twitter followers, tweeted extensively about Jefferson’s death. The day she was shot, he tweeted, “She broke no laws & did nothing wrong. We are demanding justice immediately. This was illegal. It violates both the law & policy.”
Those comments have already proven to have had an impact — on Oct. 31, the court issued a gag order in the case, prohibiting lawyers and others directly involved in Dean’s trial from speaking publicly about the case.
If Dean is indicted, those public comments may give his attorneys ammunition for a change of venue argument or influence jury selection.
Change of venue
Toby Shook, who was one of Amber Guyger’s defense attorneys, said statements made by government officials, especially the police chief or mayor, could be used to argue that Dean wouldn’t be able to get a fair trial in Tarrant County.
Guyger, a white Dallas police officer, was accused of shooting Botham Jean, her black neighbor, in his home after mistaking his apartment for her own. After being fired by the Dallas Police Department following the shooting last year, she was convicted of murder in October and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Shook and fellow defense attorney Robert Rodgers had asked to move Guyger’s trial outside of Dallas County, arguing that “media hysteria” would not allow Guyger to have a just trial. The judge denied their request.
Shook said while Dean’s case has not reached the level of publicity that Guyger’s did, there has been enough negative attention toward Dean that his lawyers may consider a change of venue.
If not, he said, they will most likely aggressively remove anyone from the jury who has formed an opinion on the case that could influence their decision.
However, changes of venue in court cases have become increasingly rare, said former prosecutor Jack Strickland, who worked at the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office for 11 years.
Social media and online news has made changing the location of a trial less effective, Strickland said.
“Now it’s naive to think that if you move the case to Amarillo then Amarillo hasn’t heard almost as much as Tarrant County has heard,” he said.
In some cases, however, national attention seems to have swayed judges to approve a change in venue. In February, a judge agreed to move the trial of Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the teenager charged in the Santa Fe High School shooting, outside of Galveston County. Pagourtzis’ lawyers argued pretrial publicity made a fair trial in Galveston County impossible.
Jury selection
Jury selection may also be impacted by the amount of publicity the case has received, Strickland said.
The more public officials talk about the case and the more attention it receives, the less likely it will be to find 12 people who haven’t heard about the case.
However, merely hearing about Dean’s case would not disqualify someone from serving on a jury.
“The real key becomes whether a potential juror has heard enough about a case that it has caused them to form an opinion of the guilt or innocence of the person on trial,” Strickland said. “If it has, can they set that opinion aside and not consider it in the trial? If they cannot set it aside, they are disqualified.”
If a potential juror has heard public officials they respect condemn Dean, or publicly say he is guilty, that could influence their thinking.
But Shook and Strickland agreed that at least locally, the public comments about Dean did not appear to cross that line into condemnation.
“I think that the statements made by the police chief and mayor as a general proposition were trying to make sure the public understood there was not going to be any sort of cover-up or minimizing what had happened,” Strickland said. “I don’t think that’s the same as saying, ‘We think he’s guilty and he should burn in hell.’”
Overall, it may be too soon to say what impact the national attention to Jefferson’s death and public officials’ pronouncements about Dean will have on the trial.
“I think it’s probably just a little too early to tell in the process,” Shook said.
