Greg Gunn murder trial: Alabama Supreme Court denies motion for judge's recusal

The trial of the Montgomery police officer charged with the 2015 murder of an unarmed black man will continue with the same judge.

The Alabama Supreme Court announced a decision Friday to deny Montgomery police officer Aaron Cody Smith's motion to have Montgomery County Circuit Judge Greg Griffin recuse himself from the case.

The motion for recusal stemmed from a social media post Griffin shared after being stopped by a police officer while walking with a stick in his hand two months after Greg Gunn, a 58-year-old African-American man, was shot and killed by Smith outside Gunn's next door neighbor's house in the Mobile Heights neighborhood on the west side of the city.

After an MPD officer stopped Griffin in April 2015, Griffin described his interaction with the officer, who was searching for a suspect holding a crowbar, on social media saying, "the only thing I was guilty of was being a black man walking down the street in his neighborhood ..."

Smith's defense attempted to use that as evidence that Griffin cannot impartially weigh on a case in which a white officer shot a black man, saying in the petition to the Supreme Court that the cases were "eerily similar."

In a response to the petition, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall countered Smith's claim.

"Smith's case is nowhere near 'eerily similar' to the respondent judge's experience," Marshall wrote. "First, the respondent judge is not dead from multiple gunshot wounds. Second, the respondent judge was stopped by an African-American police officer."

Griffin had similarly previously countered Smith's attorneys' claim saying, "This is not a stop-and-search case. This is a murder case.”

The motion for recusal was previously denied by both the Court of Appeals and by Griffin himself.

Gunn's death was the result of a stop-and-frisk that became a chase when Gunn fled from Smith. Gunn had been walking home from a neighborhood card game at approximately 3 a.m. on Feb. 25, 2015. Smith stopped Gunn without turning on his patrol lights or body camera, asked Gunn to put his hands on the vehicle and was patting Gunn down when Gunn ran.

The chase led to a scuffle. Smith tased Gunn three times, hit him with a metal baton and eventually fired seven times, shooting Gunn five times, according to preliminary hearing information from State Bureau of Invesitigation agent Jason Dinunzio.

DiNunzio said Smith told him he never had charges on Gunn at any point during the stop and subsequent chase. Smith's attorney Mickey McDermott has implied that Gunn was in possession of a crack pipe and may have been under the influence.

Next for Smith is an immunity hearing. That hearing was scheduled for Sept. 19 but was delayed by the filing of the Supreme Court petition.