Former Fort Worth police officer Aaron Dean wants the state’s highest criminal court to look at his case, after a lower court upheld his manslaughter conviction earlier this year.
Dean fatally shot Atatiana Jefferson through her bedroom window in 2019, while responding to a call about open doors at her home. In 2022, a jury convicted him of manslaughter instead of his original charge of murder.
Dean’s attorneys are now asking the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to take up the case. Jurors should only have been allowed to decide on murder, not manslaughter, Dean’s attorney Bob Gill argued in court documents filed April 16.
"[Dean’s] jury was under pressure to convict [Dean],” Gill wrote. “They compromised on manslaughter even though the facts showing only an intentional act did not justify this verdict.”
The difference between murder and manslaughter lies in intent. Generally, a killing is considered a murder when someone intends to kill the other person. If someone acts recklessly and ends up killing someone, that is defined as manslaughter.
Dean could not have committed manslaughter because he testified that he meant to shoot Jefferson, Gill argued. Part of his defense during trial was that he saw a gun in Jefferson's hand through the window and shot in self-defense.
"Either the jury thought that [Dean] acted reasonably in defending himself and his partner or they did not," Gill wrote.
Prosecutors can request that juries consider lesser charges, which is what they did in Dean’s case after both sides finished their arguments, according to Gill. Current precedent “allows the prosecution to blindside a defendant with a charge not included in the indictment and not raised by the facts,” he argued.
The filing asks the Court of Criminal Appeals to reconsider that precedent. It also brings back a familiar argument for Dean’s defense team: that his trial never should have taken place in Tarrant County.
Jefferson’s killing drew national media attention and condemnation from prominent officials, including then-Fort Worth mayor Betsy Price and former police chief Ed Kraus. Dean is white, and Jefferson was Black, and her name is often brought up alongside other Black Americans killed by police, like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
Dean’s attorneys argued the attention on the case poisoned the well of public opinion against their client, but two separate judges denied their requests to move the trial to another county.
The Texas 2nd Court of Appeals agreed with those judges when they upheld Dean’s conviction in February. The trial judge was able to seat a jury where only three people reported prior knowledge of the case, Justice Elizabeth Kerr wrote in the court’s opinion.
In his new filing, Gill says the 2nd Court of Appeals didn’t consider the “full panoply of influential persons in Tarrant County who combined to deprive [Dean] of a fair trial.” He cited more elected officials who criticized Dean or celebrated his arrest, such as U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, who responded to news of Dean’s arrest by tweeting “About time!”
The publicity on the case even influenced the jury’s sentence, Gill argued. They gave Dean eleven years, ten months and twelve days in prison, which contains an apparent reference to the month and day of Jefferson’s killing, October 12.
It’s now up to the Court of Criminal Appeals to decide whether to review Dean’s case. Gill is asking for the justices to send it back to the 2nd Court of Appeals for reconsideration.
Got a tip? Email Miranda Suarez at msuarez@kera.org. You can follow Miranda on Twitter @MirandaRSuarez.
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