Justia Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Opinion Summaries

Appellant was charged with possession of a controlled substance (cocaine). He filed a motion to suppress evidence on the basis that the evidence (the cocaine) was illegally obtained. He also filed a motion to disclose the identity of the confidential informant. The latter motion cited two bases for disclosure: (1) that the informant's identity was needed to show that the officers who conducted the arrest and search did not have probable cause based upon a reliable and credible informant, and (2) that the informant's identity was necessary because the informant was a material witness to the defendant's guilt or innocence and upon the possible defense of entrapment. Upon review of this case, the Supreme Court concluded that the dispositive nature of the motion to suppress was a term of appellant's plea agreement and that it rendered moot the second basis for appellant's motion to disclose. Furthermore, the Court concluded that appellant failed to sufficiently apprise the trial court of his intent to challenge the motion to disclose on this second basis or to challenge the dispositive nature of the plea agreement. View "Bland v. Texas" on Justia Law

Appellant was indicted for indecency with a child and aggravated sexual assault. The jury found Appellant not guilty of indecency with a child but guilty of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced him to confinement for fifty years. On appeal, Appellant claimed that he received ineffective assistance of counsel because trial counsel failed to request a jury instruction on the medical-care defense. The court of appeals reversed and remanded, holding that Appellant would have been entitled to an instruction on the medical-care defense if he had requested it. The State filed a petition for discretionary review which the Texas Supreme Court granted on two grounds: (1) whether in this case Appellant was entitled to the instruction on the medical-care defense; and (2) is it necessarily ineffective assistance of counsel to not request a defensive instruction that depends upon convincing the jury that the defendant lied to them under oath when he denied committing the prohibited conduct? The Court determined that, in his trial testimony, Appellant admitted to penetration (as defined by Texas law) which was sufficient to satisfy the admission requirement of the confession and avoidance doctrine as it related to the medical-care defense. Further, the Court concluded that Appellant received ineffective assistance of counsel because the defense was properly raised and trial counsel failed to request a jury instruction on the issue. View "Villa v. Texas" on Justia Law

Appellant was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2003. Shortly before his scheduled execution in 2012, he filed a motion to determine competency to be executed under Article 46.05. The trial court held an informal hearing, found that Appellant had not made a "substantial showing" of incompetency, and denied the motion. As a result of denying Appellant's motion, there was no formal hearing on the merits to determine if Appellant was incompetent to be executed. Appellant moved to send the record to the Supreme Court, and the trial court granted that motion. After reviewing the record, the Supreme Court determined that further review was needed and stayed the execution. Upon further review, the Court found Appellant made a substantial showing of incompetency to be executed, and so he was entitled to further proceedings, including the appointment of "at least two mental health experts" and a determination regarding competency.View "Druery v. Texas" on Justia Law

Following his arrest for driving while intoxicated, appellee filed a motion to suppress "all evidence seized as a result of illegal acts by the state." Specifically, he alleged that his arrest was illegal and that the circumstances under which breath testing for blood-alcohol concentration was conducted rendered the results as illegally obtained. At a pretrial hearing on the motion to suppress, the State presented testimony from one of the arresting officers and then rested. The trial court determined that the appellee's arrest was legal, but nevertheless granted the appellee's motion to suppress on the basis that "[t]he State failed to present any testimony regarding the breath test results[.]" The State appealed, and the Court of Appeals reversed the trial court's ruling, holding that the arrest was legal and that the appellee had failed to establish any illegalities in the way the breath-test results were obtained. The Supreme Court granted appellee's petition for review of his contention that the court of appeals erred in failing to uphold the trial court's ruling as "correct under any theory of law applicable to the case." The Supreme Court acknowledged that appellants can be deprived of an adequate opportunity "to develop a complete factual record" with respect to an alternative legal theory, and it would be incongruous with case law to treat a purported alternative legal theory as truly law "applicable to the case" under those circumstances. "If the alternative legal theory that an appellee proffers for the first time on appeal as a basis to affirm a trial court's otherwise faulty judgment turns upon the production of predicate facts by the appellant (here, the State) that he was never fairly called upon to adduce during the course of the proceedings below, then application of the 'Calloway' rule to affirm that otherwise faulty judgment works a manifest injustice. An appellee's alternative legal theory should not be considered 'law applicable to the case' under these circumstances, and this is so regardless of whether the appellee was the defendant or the State at the trial court level." Accordingly, the Court held that, because the State was never confronted with the necessity of meeting its burden to establish the scientific reliability of its breath-test results at the hearing on the appellee's pretrial motion to suppress, and for that reason the record was undeveloped with respect to admissibility as a function of scientific reliability, inadmissibility of that evidence under Rule 702 was not a "theory of law applicable to the case" that was available to justify the trial court's otherwise erroneous ruling on the appellee's motion to suppress. The Court affirmed the court of appeals' judgment.View "Texas v. Esparza" on Justia Law

Applicant was charged with murder, but convicted by a jury of the lesser included offense of manslaughter. He was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment. The Sixth Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction. In 2006, Applicant moved for post-conviction DNA testing. In 2009, the trial court granted the motion and ordered the test. Although a knife had tested presumptively positive for blood, no DNA testing had been performed on the knife at the time of Applicant's trial. The results of the DNA testing performed on two stains from the knife indicated that a third party was excluded as a possible source of, or contributor to, the DNA profile obtained from the knife. A hearing was conducted on the post-conviction DNA testing results, at which Applicant argued that he was entitled to a new trial because the State had referred to the knife as the weapon used by Applicant and relied on the knife to prove its case against Applicant. Applicant then filed this application for writ of habeas corpus, raising five grounds for review in his application, including prosecutorial misconduct in failing to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense, ineffective assistance of trial counsel, and actual innocence. The Supreme Court remanded the matter to the trial court to obtain findings and affidavits addressing Applicant's claims. After the habeas hearing, the trial court entered findings of fact and conclusions of law, recommending that relief be granted on the basis of actual innocence. However, after its review, the Supreme Court found the trial court’s recommendation was not supported by the record. Furthermore, even if, as Applicant argued, the knife was "the piece of tangible evidence" upon which the jury relied to convict him, there was ample "intangible" evidence that Applicant stabbed several people with a knife on the night of the offense, including the testimony of people who saw Applicant stab people, and people who were themselves stabbed. Therefore, the Supreme Court concluded the DNA test results did not show by clear and convincing evidence that no reasonable juror would have convicted him in light of the new evidence. Accordingly, habeas relief was denied. View "Ex parte Holloway, II" on Justia Law

Ronald Wortham was convicted of injury to a child. The Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment, holding that the trial judge did not err in denying Wortham's request for a jury instruction on the lesser-included offenses of reckless and criminally negligent injury to a child. Because the court of appeals misapplied the two-part analysis used to determine the availability of lesser-included offense instructions, the Supreme Court reversed its judgment and remanded the case for further proceedings. View "Wortham, Jr. v. Texas" on Justia Law

Appellant was convicted of the intentional murder of more than one person during the same criminal transaction (his wife and his mother-in-law), for which he received the death penalty. Appellant did not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence to support either his conviction or death sentence. In fourteen of his twenty-four points of error, he claimed he was incompetent to stand trial, or that the trial court should at least have paused the proceedings at various stages of trial to conduct a formal competency hearing, as his trial counsel repeatedly requested. The Supreme Court concluded that this case presented one of the relatively rare instances in which there was at least some evidence from which it may rationally be inferred not only: (1) that defendant suffered some degree of debilitating mental illness; and that (2) he obstinately refused to cooperate with counsel to his own apparent detriment; but also that (3) his mental illness was what fueled his obstinacy. “Whenever a trial court's informal inquiry establishes that there is some evidence that could rationally support all three of these inferences, it should conduct a formal competency trial.” Accordingly, the Supreme Court sustained appellant's ninth point of error, abated the appeal, and remanded the case back to the trial court. On remand, the trial court was mandated to first determine whether it was feasible to conduct a retrospective competency trial, given the passage of time, availability of evidence, and any other pertinent considerations. Should the trial court deem a retrospective competency trial to be feasible, it should proceed to conduct such a trial in accordance with Chapter 46B, Subchapter C, of the Code of Criminal Procedure. View "Turner v. Texas" on Justia Law

In two separate indictments, appellant was charged with stalking his former girlfriend. Before trial, the judge permitted the State to consolidate the offenses and denied appellant's motion to sever. The jury convicted appellant of both offenses, and the trial judge sentenced appellant to ten years' confinement for each offense, to run concurrently. On appeal, appellant argued that the trial judge erred by denying his motion to sever. The court of appeals agreed, holding that appellant had an absolute right to sever under Section 3.04 of the Texas Penal Code. Finding the error harmful, the court of appeals reversed appellant's conviction and ordered a new trial. The Supreme Court concluded that the error was harmless because the State was entitled to offer evidence of appellant's prior acts of harassment relevant to the first stalking offense to prove the elements of the second stalking offense. View "Werner v. Texas" on Justia Law

Appellant was charged with the third degree felony of communicating in a sexually explicit manner with a person whom he believed to be a minor with an intent to arouse or gratify his sexual desire. He filed a pretrial application for a writ of habeas corpus alleging that this specific subsection of the felony offense of online solicitation of a minor was facially unconstitutional because: (1) it was overbroad and criminalized a wide range of speech protected by the First Amendment; (2) it was vague because the term "sexually explicit" communications that "relate to" sexual conduct chills the exercise of free-speech by causing citizens to steer wide of the uncertain boundaries between permitted and prohibited speech; and (3) it violated the Dormant Commerce Clause. The trial judge denied relief, and the court of appeals affirmed. The Supreme Court granted discretionary review to determine, as a matter of first impression, whether Section 33.021(b) was s facially unconstitutional. The Court concluded the court of appeals used the wrong standard of review for addressing constitutional challenges to a penal statute that restricts speech based on its content, therefore it reached the wrong conclusion. Applying the constitutionally required presumption that "content-based regulations [of speech] are presumptively invalid" and subject to strict scrutiny, the Supreme Court concluded that Section 33.021(b) of the Texas Penal Code was overbroad because it prohibited a wide array of constitutionally protected speech and was not narrowly drawn to achieve only the legitimate objective of protecting children from sexual abuse. The Court did not address whether the provision was also unconstitutionally vague or violated the Dormant Commerce Clause. The Court of Appeals’ decision was reversed and the case remanded to the trial court to dismiss the indictment. View "Ex parte Lo" on Justia Law

Applicant Robert Harleston, Jr., was serving a twenty-five-year sentence for the aggravated sexual assault of a child. In his application for a writ of habeas corpus, Applicant claimed that he was actually innocent based on the victim's alleged recantations. After conducting a live evidentiary hearing, the habeas court adopted findings of fact that the victim's recantations were credible and recommended that this Court grant relief. After independently reviewing the record, the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the habeas court's findings that the victim's recantations were credible because those findings were not supported by the record. The Court held that Applicant failed to present clear and convincing evidence that unquestionably established his innocence. View "Ex parte Harelston" on Justia Law