A year after mistrial, man gets 15 years in prison in Sansom Park motorcycle gang killing
BY NICOLE LOPEZ Fort Worth Star -Telegram May 30, 2024
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/crime/article288863220.html#storylink=cpy
After a Tarrant County judge declared a mistrial in a motorcycle gang killing in Sansom Park and recused herself from the case, Anthony Patterson was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Wednesday. On Tuesday a jury found Patterson, 28, guilty in the fatal stabbing of Christopher Johnson, 29, outside a Sansom Park bar in 2020. He was convicted on charges Tuesday of murder and engaging in organized criminal activity.
The sentence comes about a year after State District Judge Elizabeth Beach declared a mistrial on each of the six counts on which Patterson was indicted by a grand jury: engaging in organized criminal activity-murder; murder; two counts of engaging in organized criminal activity-aggravated assault with a deadly weapon; and two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. In April 2023, Beach concluded the first jury was unable to reach a verdict in the case. “So the court at this time, in that the jury has been kept together for such a time as to render it altogether improbable that it can agree, the court will declare a mistrial and the jury will be dismissed,” Beach said according to an April 13, 2023 transcript.
According to Beach, the jury deliberated for 21 hours over a span of four days, exceeding the 19 to 20 hours of testimony the jury heard.
Patterson’s defense attorney James Martin sought the recusal on the grounds that Beach has personal knowledge of disputed evidentiary facts in the case and that she has been a material witness
In the recusal motion, Martin said Beach concluded the proceedings “so quickly that the court did not allow enough time for either the State or [Patterson] to make any objection on the record.” No reasonable opportunity was afforded for Patterson’s counsel to object in the moment, Martin wrote. The jury had not indicated it was deadlocked, he said. In September 2023, Beach recused herself. The case was transferred to Judge David Hagerman’s domain in the 297th District Court.
But the defense argued that constitutional prohibitions regarding prosecuting a defendant on the same charges twice should bar Patterson’s retrial. Patterson’s attorney sought the case’s dismissal on double jeopardy grounds.
Patterson failed to show that the court abused its discretion in discharging the jury, Tarrant County Assistant Criminal District Attorney Page Simpson wrote in the state’s response to the defense double jeopardy argument. In January, Judge Hagerman denied the double jeopardy motion and scheduled the retrial, which began last week.
Two other defendants were charged in the fatal stabbing. Patterson was a member of the Pagan’s outlaw motorcycle gang, the district attorney’s office alleged. Patterson and his co-defendants, Christopher Bailey and Nathaniel McCurdy, falsely believed Johnson to be a member of Hells Angels, a rival gang, according to the district attorney’s office.
Johnson was stabbed in a parking lot on Oct. 24, 2020, after Patterson and others forced him outside from Eight Balls Billiard and Bar in the 5800 block of Jacksboro Highway, according to the DA’s office. Patterson, Bailey and McCurdy were arrested in February 2021 as they attended a Pagan’s rally in Hunt County.
A jury on Oct. 26, 2022, found McCurdy, 37, guilty on six counts in an indictment identical to Patterson’s, and Beach sentenced him to 50 years in prison. On the day Beach declared a mistrial in the first Patterson trial, the district attorney’s office filed a motion to dismiss the indictment that charged Bailey. He testified as a witness for the state at McCurdy’s trial.