Jurors deadlock on murder charge in Casey Goodson Jr. retrial, deputy convicted of reckless homicide

Jurors gave Casey Goodson Jr.'s family a partial verdict Thursday, convicting former Franklin County sheriff’s deputy Jason Meade of reckless homicide while deadlocking on the murder charge tied to the 2020 shooting death of the 23-year-old Black man in Columbus, Ohio.

The split outcome underscored the limits of police accountability in a case that has shadowed Franklin County for years. Meade now stands convicted of the lesser offense, but the jurors’ inability to agree on murder forced the judge to declare another mistrial on the more serious count. It was Meade’s second murder trial after an earlier proceeding ended the same way in 2024.

Prosecutors said Goodson was carrying Subway sandwiches and walking into his grandmother’s house when Meade shot him five times in the back on December 4, 2020. Testimony at trial indicated no one else saw Goodson holding a gun. Meade testified that he believed Goodson was armed and turned toward him, and his lawyers argued that he acted lawfully.

The case remained complicated by the lack of video evidence. Franklin County deputies were not equipped with body-worn cameras or dash cameras at the time of the shooting, leaving jurors to weigh conflicting accounts without footage of the encounter. That absence helped fuel protests in Columbus after the shooting and kept attention fixed on how little is sometimes available to test an officer’s version of events.

Goodson’s mother, Tamala Payne, said the verdict brought her family closure and peace after years of seeking accountability. For the family, the reckless-homicide conviction marked a measure of recognition, even as the hung murder count left the most serious question unresolved.

Meade retired from the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department in 2021. On the day of the shooting, he said he was working with a U.S. Marshals Service task-force search for a fugitive, though the Marshals said Goodson was not the person being sought and that Meade was not carrying out a Marshals mission.

The case has become one of the most closely watched police shooting prosecutions in Ohio, testing how far jurors are willing to go when an officer says he feared for his life and the state says a man was shot from behind while entering home with groceries. The verdict left one charge answered and another still open, a reminder that even after years of litigation and two trials, accountability can still stop short of the highest legal threshold.