The case of a white police officer charged with murder in the shooting death of an unarmed black man in Alabama three years ago is now on its ninth judge.
Eight judges have dropped out as the case makes its way to trial, with the eighth recusing himself earlier this week, just a few days after being appointed.
A Montgomery police officer, Aaron Smith, is to face a jury over the killing of Greg Gunn, who fled a random stop-and-frisk and was chased, shocked, beaten and then shot five times in 2016, by Smith while he was on duty.
Smith has argued that he acted in self-defense. Sam Welch became the eighth judge assigned to the case last Friday and then recused himself this week.
The state supreme court has now ranged further afield from Montgomery and tapped the retired Dale county circuit judge Philip Ben McLauchlin, in a ninth attempt to pick a judge to hear the case, the Montgomery Advertiser reported. Welch is a former presiding judge of the state court of criminal appeals who said he had denied motions asking for another judge’s recusal.
The shooting happened in February 2016, when the officer was 23 and Gunn was 58, in the west Montgomery neighborhood of Mobile Heights.
“My brother is not a violent person and never has been,” Kenneth Gunn told the local television channel WBRC about Greg Gunn at the time.
Gunn had spent the night playing cards at a home down the street. In a statement just after the shooting, the police chief, Ernest Finley, said Smith had stopped a “suspicious” person on foot. He reportedly may have been carrying the kind of metal pole that decorators use to extend a paint roller, which neighbors said at the time was not uncommon for members of the public walking at night in the high-crime area, for self-defense in case of trouble.
Legal representation for Gunn at the time disputed the description of the man as suspicious.
Smith’s defense team has tried several times to have the case moved away from Montgomery and has now succeeded.
