FORT WORTH, Texas — Two attorneys who represent a former Fort Worth police officer who is next month to go to trial on a murder indictment have filed a motion describing their work in seven other cases to which they argue local and state legal code assigns scheduling priority.
The attorneys, Bob Gill and Miles Brissette, did not explicitly request a new trial date for Aaron Dean, but wrote in the motion that they have commitments elsewhere on June 21, when jury selection is to begin in the Dean case, and in the weeks before that date.
Among the considerations, the attorneys asserted in the motion they filed on Monday, is that Dean is not detained in jail, as are the defendants in the conflicting cases. Dean was released on a bond.
Scheduling in conflicting cases must be resolved by Texas criminal procedure code, government code and local rules, the motion argues. The other Gill and Brissette cases should be prioritized, according to the motion, because the codes and rules elevate the cases of other defendants, who were indicted before Dean, or because of the age of the victim or the nature of the offense.
Scheduling matters have beset the trial for Dean, who is accused in the death of Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth in October 2019. The case, in Tarrant County’s 297th District Court, has previously been delayed by the unavailability of two defense expert witness, other defense counsel schedule conflicts, the illness of a third Dean attorney and, first, by a logjam of trials caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
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 about 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 the same day he was arrested, two days after the shooting. The department said he would have been fired if he had not resigned.
Brissette is scheduled on June 23 to represent Clifford Glenn at a final pretrial hearing in an aggravated sexual assault of a child case. The jury in the Dean case is scheduled to hear opening statements on that date.
“Mr. Glenn is currently in poor health in the Tarrant County jail. He has been confined for over 390 days based upon these charges,” Brissette and Gill wrote in the motion.
Brissette is also scheduled to begin a robbery case bench trial on June 23.
Gill refers in the motion to several trials between now and late June for which he is scheduled or preparing. Gill also refers to his early June deadline to file an appellate brief.
The attorneys wrote that they are available to confer with prosecutors and Judge David Hagerman, who they requested grant a hearing on the motion.
Hagerman has at times expressed irritation at the snags that have led him to a continuance. Most recently, on May 4, Hagerman rescheduled the case because lead Dean attorney Jim Lane has been ill for about two months and unable to prepare for the trial.
Hagerman said the court “will not be held hostage indefinitely” by unknown factors, such as the length of Lane’s illness, which he said appears to be “serious, debilitating and possibly even dire.”
Hagerman at the time described rescheduling the trial as a “monumental inconvenience.”
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