District attorney will not retry Fort Worth officer accused in shooting

A Fort Worth police officer will not face a second trial in the 2015 shooting of a mentally ill man.

A dismissal of the charge against officer Courtney Johnson was filed Thursday by Tarrant County District Attorney Sharen Wilson.

“After review of the trial case, and the evidence produced at that trial, it is my belief that any subsequent retrial is unlikely to result in the return of a unanimous jury verdict,” a motion filed by Wilson states.

Johnson was accused of shooting Craigory Adams by recklessly handling his own shotgun. Last week, a deadlocked jury led a state district judge to declare a mistrial. The jury split 5-to-7, but it is not known which way the majority voted.

Kenneth Finley, Adams’ cousin, said of Wilson’s decision: “I don’t feel good about it. It is what it is. That’s the system.”

Johnson testified during his trial that based on information from the 911 call taker, he thought Adams was holding a knife, but it was actually a barbecue fork. Johnson’s attorneys, Tim Choy and Jim Lane, maintained that the shooting was accidental but acknowledged that the case may have been difficult for jurors to understand.

Lane said the officer was on the shooting range Thursday to recertify and that his gun and badge have been returned. Police said they cannot confirm that Johnson has returned to regular duty until they receive official notice that the case has been dismissed, said officer Daniel Segura, police spokesman.

Lane said the national issue regarding the shooting of African-Americans by white officers can affect the outcome when officers go on trial.

In a Pew survey of nearly 8,000 police officers published in January, 86 percent said their jobs are made harder by video of violent encounters between police officers and minorities and the protests that sometimes follow.

About the same percentage of officers surveyed say their colleagues worry more about their safety, the study said.

About two-thirds of the police questioned characterize the fatal encounters triggering those protests as isolated incidents and not signs of broader problems between police and the black community. In a separate Pew survey of U.S. adults, 60 percent said the incidents are symptoms of a deeper problem.

“I knew when we picked that jury that we weren’t going to get a verdict,” Lane said. “You can watch jurors and tell whether they are listening or whether they are tuning you out.”

As videos of police encounters with African-American and other minorities have proliferated, the prosecution of police officers has become more common, according to a recent New York Times story.

“Prosecutors are looking for jurors who are usually more suspicious of law enforcement — liberals, minorities and people with arrest records — while the defense prefers conservatives, whites and the well-off, who tend to be more trusting of police officers,” the Times story said.

Lane said that everyone is biased or prejudiced to some degree and that those who sit in the jury box are no exception.

What people often do not understand is that police officers have maybe a second to make a decision that could cost them or someone else their life. In Johnson’s case there were credible expert witnesses to explain the dynamics of the types of life-and-death decisions that officers have to make, Lane said.

“Football players train day in and day out on what they need to do on certain plays, and when it’s time to play the game they still go the wrong way,” Lane said.

For police officers the situations they find themselves facing are much more intense.

“What you want on a jury is people who will listen and who will follow the law,” Lane said. “What saved us in that case was the law. The law said that you have to make a decision based on what the officer knew at the time.”

This report contains material from the Star-Telegram archives.

This story was originally published June 1, 2017 at 12:28 PM with the headline "District attorney will not retry Fort Worth officer accused in shooting."