Manslaughter Suspect Jason Scott Little Will Get His Day in Court...Eventually

SAN ANGELO, TX -- Jason Scott Little has spent the last three years in jail on a manslaughter charge in connection with the shooting death of Bertha Vasquez in Eva’s Place Bar on MLK Blvd. on Superbowl Sunday 2015.  

His jury trial has been delayed several times, the last in October when District Attorney John Best informed District Judge Brad Goodwin that the San Angelo Police Department after two years found the in-car video of the first police officer on the scene.  Officer Tina Burks testified today that she found out that she had mislabeled the video and it wasn’t until October that the PD found the video.  

At a pretrial hearing in October, defense attorney Evan Pierce-Jones told Judge Goodwin he would need four to six months to vet the Burks video.  Goodwin rescheduled the jury trial from October 2017 to April 2018.  Today, Pierce-Jones asked Judge Goodwin to move the trial to February because he and his team were now ready for trial.  

Prosecutors objected saying they have 35 witnesses to call and it takes time to round up and schedule that many witnesses and they were scheduling all of them for the April jury trial date.  

Judge Goodwin denied Pierce-Jones’s motion to move the trial to February.  

Little’s grandmother took the stand in the motion hearing Friday.  She said she thought he was innocent and that when he arrested three years ago he had a good job and a one-year-old child.  Pierce-Jones said he wanted to try the case as early as possible because, “as he sits here today, Jason Little is an innocent man and we are trying to limit the harm being done to Mr. Little.”

That motion to move the trial up was one of 11 motions filed and argued by defense attorneys today.  Judge Goodwin denied motions dealing with disciplinary records of San Angelo Police Officers involved in the in-car video situation and the Department of Public Safety’s DNA testing software.  

Judge Goodwin told attorneys at the beginning of the hearing that the proceeding was scheduled for one hour.  It took three hours Friday afternoon.  

Jason Scott Little’s jury trial is scheduled to begin at 9:00 a.m. April 23, 2018.  Judge Goodwin at one point told attorneys, “ I’ve been whipping and spurring trying to get this to trial!”

Three San Angelo Police Officers testified in the motion hearing.  Pierce-Jones had subpoenaed San Angelo Police Chief Frank Carter and Sheriff’s Deputy Beth Mull, but they were not called to testify.