Texas v. Waters

October 31, 2018 by Justia

In October 2015, while Appellee Amanda Waters was on community supervision for an offense, she was arrested for DWI. Based on her arrest, the State filed a motion to revoke her community supervision, alleging, among other grounds, that she had violated the terms of her supervision by committing another criminal offense. In February 2016, the trial court held a hearing on the State’s motion to revoke. The State’s sole evidence in support of its allegation that Waters had committed DWI was the testimony of Waters’s community supervision officer, Officer Jetton. Officer Jetton testified he was aware that Waters had been arrested for DWI, but he otherwise had no personal knowledge of the facts surrounding the alleged offense. Based on this evidence, the trial judge determined that the State had failed to prove by a preponderance that Waters committed DWI as alleged in the State’s motion, and found the allegation “not true.” The trial judge rejected the State’s motion to revoke, and he issued an order continuing Waters on community supervision. In March 2016, the State filed an information charging Waters with the same instance of DWI that had been alleged in the motion to revoke. Waters subsequently filed a pretrial application for a writ of habeas corpus in which she contended that her prosecution for DWI was barred by collateral estoppel pursuant to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals’s holding in Ex parte Tarver, 725 S.W.2d 195 (Tex. Crim. App. 1986). Relying on Tarver, Waters asserted that, because the State had previously sought to revoke her community supervision based on the same instance of DWI that was alleged in the information and the trial judge at the revocation hearing had found that allegation “not true,” the State was precluded from prosecuting her for that offense. The State argued in its petition for discretionary review that Tarver was abrogated and should have been expressly abandoned. The Court concluded Tarver met the narrow criteria for overruling prior precedent, and it abandoned the rule of that decision. The Court therefore reversed the court of appeals that had applied Tarver to uphold the trial court’s dismissal of the information filed against Waters and remanded this case back to the trial four for further proceedings. View "Texas v. Waters" on Justia Law