‘A battle all my life’: Final charge dismissed against wrongfully convicted Fort Worth man
After 26 years, Aaron Dyson is a totally free man.
The 43-year-old was 17 when he shot the man who killed his best friend. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison, but not for the shooting. Instead, prosecutors charged Dyson with engaging in organized crime.
Dyson never denied he shot the man. The shooting was an irrational decision made out of anger and grief, he said. But he was never a gang member, and last year the criminal justice system finally agreed with him. He spent two years fighting for his innocence, then the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit stepped in.
It looked like Dyson’s entanglement with the criminal justice system was over when the district attorney’s office admitted following the Conviction Integrity Unit’s investigation that in 1997 it made a mistake.
It wasn’t.
Last April, after spending 24 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, Dyson was charged with the one he did. Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. They offered a plea deal for eight years, time served. He had already spent an extra 16 years in prison.
But Dyson didn’t take the deal and it looked like the case would go to trial until this week, when the charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon was dismissed.
Prosecutors in the written motion to dismiss listed the reason as “prosecutorial discretion.” In a statement to the Star-Telegram, the DA’s office wrote that the charge was dismissed because of the time Dyson had already served.
“In the interest of justice, the District Attorney’s Office decided to dismiss this case,” the statement read. “Mr. Dyson has already served more than the maximum amount of time allowed by law for the conduct he committed.”
The statement did not elaborate on why the charges were filed or a plea deal was initially offered with eight years time served.
For Dyson, it doesn’t matter why they decided to dismiss the aggravated assault with a deadly weapon charge.
“I don’t really care, because it was the right decision,” Dyson told the Star-Telegram.
‘Fighting my case for 27 years’
Dyson was indicted in 1997 on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and engaging in organized crime after he shot the man who killed Dyson’s best friend. But when time came for the trial, he was only prosecuted for engaging in organized crime.
After he was wrongfully convicted, the aggravated assault with a deadly weapon charge was dismissed under prosecutorial discretion. The charge was not dismissed with prejudice, meaning it could be refiled at a later date.
Dyson doesn’t hold anything against the current Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, saying the people who charged him are no longer there.
“I don’t harbor any kind of resentment or disdain toward the district attorney’s office as it is now,” Dyson said. “It was the prosecutors back in the ‘90s. They weren’t seeking truth and justice when they walked into that courtroom. They were seeking victories. That’s a travesty.”
Dyson said the prosecution at the time knew the charge for engaging in organized crime was wrong.
“They didn’t like the fact that the aggravated assault with a deadly weapon carried up to 20 and trumped up some charges that I was in a gang,” he said.
Dyson was never in gang, though. He said that the prosecution in 1997 used false testimony from a witness, charged with other crimes and offered a deal for testifying, to win the case.
Over the course of 22 years, Dyson worked with nine different attorneys to appeal his case. It wasn’t until a friend told him he should write to the Conviction Integrity Unit that he started getting somewhere. For months, attorney after attorney turned down his request to help him write an appeal for the unit to look into his case.
“It was really a beatdown,” Dyson said.
Eventually, having spent a lot of his time in prison studying, earning degrees and reading, Dyson decided he would write to the unit himself.
He submitted a 38-page document outlining his case and waited. It was about nine or 10 weeks later when he got a response: The unit’s investigation determined, and the district attorney agreed, that he was convicted a crime he didn’t commit.
The relief was indescribable.
“I was scared to death that my parents would die while I was in prison for this wrongful conviction,” he said. “I was scared I would die in prison.”
He was welcomed back on the day of his release by family and friends who he said have supported him all along.
He lived all of his 20s and 30s in prison. It was surreal to be free, but it wasn’t all easy. For the first couple of months after he was released, Dyson said he couldn’t sleep.
His mind was racing all the time and adjusting to the world after spending so much of his life and youth behind bars wasn’t an immediate and smooth transition. He said he didn’t get any help from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice after his relief. If it weren’t for the support system he had outside of prison, including family, friends and advocates, he would have been totally on his own.
But he did start to adjust. Dyson got a job building outdoor kitchens and decks and decor. He got married. He started sleeping well again.
Then, about a year after he was released, he was notified that he was being charged again. The district attorney’s office last year refiled the 1997 charge for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Dyson said he thinks the DA’s office at the time decided to reintroduce the charge because he had no convictions in his record anymore and they didn’t like that.
He was offered the deal for eight years but turned it down. For more than a year, he was again in a battle with the criminal justice system. So when he was told by his attorney Monday that the charges would be dismissed, a little more than two weeks before he was set to go to trial, Dyson wept with relief.
“I’ve been fighting my case for 27 years,” Dyson said. “This has been a battle all my life. For them to finally just acknowledge that they needed to just put that behind them and just let me go, it was a tremendous relief for my wife, for my mom, for my dad. That this chapter is finally over.”
It wasn’t only emotional for him. Dyson said he grew up in a loving home with an older brother. When he got out of prison, his parents were older. His brother was grown and successful. He’d missed out on so much, and he wasn’t the only one. For his parents and the rest of his family, Dyson said a part of their lives went to prison with him.
“When I told them they dropped the charges, my mom cried. My dad, he choked up,” Dyson said. “I was a 17-year-old kid in a loving home. Both my parents are loving people. I was ripped away from that home and tossed into the pits of hell. I was a kid.”
One last fight
Dyson’s odyssey isn’t over yet. His next, and he hopes final, step is to seek financial compensation for a wrongful conviction to help make up for all the time he was in prison and unable to earn his own money, contribute to a retirement fund or put money into social security.
He said compensation for time he served on a wrongful conviction is something he’s owed and, more importantly, needs. And while he doesn’t blame today’s district attorney, Dyson said the state still needs to be held accountable.
It’ll probably be a legal battle, he says, and even though he’s growing tired of fighting with the legal system he’s ready for it.
His primary concerns have to do with his ability to keep working and providing for himself and his family. While he was in prison, Dyson got his GED and two college degrees, one in business and another in applied sciences, but he wasn’t able to prepare for retirement. And even with those degrees, getting ahead in any career without any employment history is hard.
He’s still doing the same work building outdoor kitchens and decks and gardens and other decorations and he loves it, but Dyson said it’s physically intensive work. If he can’t work because of an injury, he doesn’t get paid. He’s dealing with a lower back injury right now, and that’s while he’s still in good shape.
“As I get older, it’s going to get harder and harder to do this,” Dyson said. “Eventually my body’s going to break down.”
Because he never had an opportunity in his 20s and 30s to pay into social security, he’s concerned he won’t get benefits if he can’t work. Then there’s the concern that his ability to do the heavy lifting and intensive labor will wane and disappear as he gets older.
He wants to start his own business doing the same thing one day, but right now that’s not an option.
“I lost a lot of good working years, a lot of time I could have been saving up money to start a business,” he said.
If he gets the wrongful conviction compensation, he plans to put money into savings and then use the rest, along with his college degrees and work experience, to start his own business. That’ll set him up so he can keep earning money even if he can’t work. And, he said he wants the opportunity to contribute to his community by providing jobs to skilled workers.
