Hearing scheduled on defense motion to recuse judge in Atatiana Jefferson killing
A state appellate court justice will next week consider a defense motion to recuse the judge handling the case of a former Fort Worth police officer who is awaiting trial on a murder indictment.
Second Court of Appeals Justice Lee Gabriel will after a hearing on June 23 determine whether grounds exist to keep the Aaron Dean case under the dominion of state District Judge David Hagerman or assign it to a different judge.
Hagerman has demonstrated in a series of rulings in the Dean case that his impartiality may reasonably be questioned, according to an assessment contained in the motion filed by Dean’s attorneys that seeks Hagerman’s recusal. The motion also asserts that the judge has a personal bias or prejudice concerning the case’s subject matter or the defense team.
David Evans, the presiding judge of the Eighth Administrative Judicial Region of Texas, assigned the recusal motion to Gabriel.
Dean’s attorneys, Miles Brissette and Bob Gill, on Tuesday filed a list of 12 witnesses that they expect to testify at the hearing.
Hagerman declined on Monday to voluntarily recuse himself.
The recusal motion cites several steps that it alleges Hagerman has taken in an improper rush to trial in Tarrant County’s 297th District Court. The judge has departed from state criminal procedure code and local rules in scheduling the trial and in one instance did not enforce a gag order in the case, the motion alleges.
Dean was indicted in the October 2019 shooting death of Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth. The trial, which Hagerman had scheduled to start next week, has been delayed pending a ruling on the recusal motion.
Brissette and Gill wrote in the motion that Hagerman “has grown increasingly hostile, overbearing and rude to counsel for Mr. Dean.”
“While this case has been pending for a while, the court does have more than 500 other cases more than a year old and more than 1500 total cases pending. What’s more, none of the others have the ramifications of this case, nor will they get the press attention,” Gill and Brissette wrote in the recusal motion.
A grand jury indicted Dean, who is white, on murder after he shot to death Jefferson, a 28-year-old Black woman, through a window while responding to a call connected to doors open at her house. Jefferson was playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew, Zion Carr, when she thought she heard a prowler in the back yard, grabbed a handgun from her purse and pointed it toward the window, Zion told a forensic interviewer, according to an arrest warrant affidavit supporting Dean’s arrest.
Dean, 37, did not identify himself as a police officer and shot Jefferson within seconds of seeing her through the window, according to body-worn camera video. He resigned from the police department on the same day he was arrested, two days after the shooting.
This story was originally published June 15, 2022 at 1:37 PM.
