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The Smith County District attorney is explaining the mishandling of a plea deal that put a criminal back on the streets who later killed a DPS trooper.
Dabrett Black is behind bars for the Thanksgiving day murder of DPS Trooper Damon Allen during a traffic stop.
Court records reveal Black had a history of incidents with law enforcement. He had an active warrant out for his arrest from an incident in July where he rammed his vehicle into a deputy's car and evaded arrest.
In 2015, Black was also behind bars for viciously beating a Smith County deputy and trying to take his gun away. He served less than a year in jail for that before he was back out because of a plea deal.
Smith County District Attorney Matt Bingham says it came down to one of his prosecutors cutting a plea deal without his knowledge.
One of Black's charges in the 2015 beating of a deputy was dismissed and the other was pled down to a misdemeanor. It ultimately put Black back on the streets in less than a year before he allegedly killed Trooper Allen.
Video of the 2015 incident released by the Smith County Sheriff's Office shows Black pummeling Deputy Wesley Dean several times as Dean was responding to an assault call. According to a report from the sheriff's office, Deputy Dean had been trying to detain Black.
Records reveal Deputy Dean had a broken nose, black eyes and needed six stitches. Black was charged with two felonies for assault against a public servant and attempting to take a weapon from the officer.
“If you take a gun from a police officer, that is about the most dangerous scenario you can have because there's only one reason you're taking a gun from a police officer,” Bingham said.
A plea deal allowed Black to plead guilty to a single, lesser misdemeanor charge and was out of jail in less than a year.
Black is an Iraq war veteran whose army medical records show he suffers from PTSD, paranoid schizophrenia and depressive disorder. it's unclear if that factored into the deal he got.
Bingham says he had no idea about that deal made by one of his prosecutors until Thanksgiving Day when he got a call informing him Black had been involved in the death of Trooper Allen.
“And he goes, ‘Dabrett Black's the guy that had beat up the deputy and we, you know, your office reduced it.’ That was the first time I found out we had a felony case reduced to a class A misdemeanor,” the district attorney said.
Bingham says Smith County prosecutor Jacob Putnam did not get approval for Black’s plea deal as required by office policy. Not doing so is grounds for dismissal.
“When he pled these cases, we had, I had no knowledge of the cases nor did we give our approval for him to handle those cases the way he did,” Bingham said.
But the district attorney says Putman won’t be fired.
“The decisions prosecutors make are extremely important decisions,” he said. “The more experience you have, the better decisions you're going to make. Everybody makes decisions they regret.”
Putnam is in line to take over as Smith County district attorney in 2019. Bingham says it's his hope Putnam learns from the case and gets more experience on the job before he becomes DA. Bingham also says he plans to look back at past cases to see if those cases were mishandled.