The Alabama Supreme Court has rejected an appeal filed by a former Montgomery police officer to overturn his conviction of manslaughter in the 2016 shooting death of 58-year-old Gregory Gunn.
In January 2020, Aaron Cody Smith was sentenced to 14 years in prison after chasing and tasing Gunn in a west Montgomery neighborhood in the early hours of Feb. 25, 2016, before fatally shooting him.
Smith resigned from MPD following his conviction and until May 10 of this year, he remained free on a $300,000 appeal bond.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals denied Smith’s appeal on two prior occasions, and once a judge ordered him to begin serving his sentence in May, Smith filed his petition with the Alabama Supreme Court for an appeal.
Of the six justices who concurred with the court’s decision on Friday, several noted that Smith’s case could have grounds for further appeals.
“It is rare to read an appellate-court decision that simultaneously affirms a defendant’s conviction while also describing as ‘largely undisputed’ a factual record that seems more consistent with the defendant’s innocence than his guilt,” Justice Jay Mitchell wrote. “But the Court of Criminal Appeals’ memorandum in this case does just that.”
Justice Tommy Bryan wrote a separate, also concurring, opinion to highlight that Smith’s counsel failed to challenge the “adequacy of specific-intent evidence” at trial, in a post-trial motion, on direct appeal or in his certiorari petition.
“That omission appears to be problematic and perhaps raises a serious question about the effectiveness of Smith’s counsel,” Bryan wrote.
In Mitchell’s concurring opinion, he lays out the “undisputed evidence” of events on Feb. 25 according to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals as follows:
Smith was patrolling a neighborhood in west Montgomery around 3 a.m. when he drove past Gunn walking with his hands in his pockets. As Gunn began walking away, Smith got out of his car and stopped him for a pat-down. When Smith felt an object that “he believed could be a gun,” Gunn broke free and a chase ensued, according to court documents.
Smith used his taser and his baton on Gunn before pursuing him onto the front porch of a neighbor’s house. There, Gunn picked up a painter’s pole and lunged at Smith.
According to the opinion, Smith shot and killed Gunn. An autopsy showed seven gunshot wounds, concentrated on and around the arm Smith said Gunn was using to hold the painter’s pole.
When a Dale County jury convened in November of 2019, they found that Smith was guilty of intentionally causing the death of Gunn and that the intent was less culpable because it was caused in the sudden “heat of passion.”
Mitchell noted that the court could not conduct a de novo review, or decide on the case without referencing the decisions of lower courts.
“But if it is true, as the Court of Criminal Appeals stated, that the facts described above are ‘largely undisputed,’ then it is difficult to understand how a reasonable, properly instructed jury could have convicted Smith,” Mitchell wrote.
Moreover, he called Smith’s failure to litigate the adequacy of specific-intent evidence “frankly, bizarre.”
Smith remains in state custody at Limestone Correctional Facility.
Hadley Hitson covers the rural South for the Montgomery Advertiser and Report for America. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com. To support her work,subscribe to the Advertiser ordonate to Report for America.
