Justia Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Opinion Summaries

Appellant Ramon Perez was convicted of three counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child and two counts of indecency with a child by contact. He was sentenced to life in prison for each of the three aggravated counts and twenty years in prison and a fine for each count of indecency. All sentences were to run consecutively. The Tenth Court of Appeals affirmed his sentence. Appellant was originally charged in an eleven-count indictment with four counts of indecency with a child and seven counts of aggravated sexual assault. The day before trial, the State filed a motion asking the trial court to amend the indictment by replacing the existing eleven counts with the five counts in an attached exhibit. The motion also stated, "The Defendant, by and through his attorney of record, has been notified that the State is seeking amendment of the indictment, agrees to the amendment and waives ten (10) days notice to prepare for trial ...." The State's motion was signed by appellant and his trial attorney as "Agreed." The trial court held a hearing on the motion. Appellant's trial counsel stated that he had no objections to the amendments and that they were waiving the statutorily-allowed extra time. On appeal of his convictions, however, appellant raised two issues: 1) whether the indictment was properly amended from its original eleven counts to five ; and 2) whether the trial court committed reversible error by not granting the appellant a hearing on his motion for new trial. Finding no error, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the Court of Appeals. View "Perez v. Texas" on Justia Law

Just after 2 A.M., officers were dispatched to a fast food restaurant following a complaint of a disturbance between the restaurant’s customers and two intoxicated men. Upon arrival, the officer encountered two men that matched the complainant’s description; the men were sitting in a truck with the engine running in the restaurant’s parking lot. The officer told appellee three times to turn off the truck before appellee complied. Appellee had answered the officer's initial requests to turn off the truck with claims that he was not driving and that he was moving the truck for someone else. The officer had appellee exit the truck, at which time he also smelled alcohol on appellee's breath and saw that his eyes were bloodshot. To investigate his suspicion that appellee may have been driving while intoxicated, he placed appellee unhandcuffed into the back of his patrol car and called for a department DWI specialist. Appellee failed field sobriety tests and was arrested for DWI. The trial court granted appellee’s motion to suppress appellee's oral statements made to the officers. In response to the State's request, the trial court made findings of fact and conclusions of law: that the responding officer had no reasonable suspicion to detain appellee for the disturbance in the restaurant and that appellee was "under arrest for suspicion of DWI when [the DWI specialist] began questioning" him without giving him the statutory warnings. On the State's petition for discretionary review, the Supreme Court determined that the court of appeals erred: (1) by failing to apply a de novo standard of review to the trial court's ultimate legal determination that appellee was in custody when he made incriminating statements to police; and (2) by failing to abate the appeal for further findings of fact by the trial court. The case was reversed and remanded to the court of appeals with instructions to abate the case to the trial judge for supplemental findings.View "Saenz v. Texas" on Justia Law

Appellant Jamie Zamora and his brother Danny had a business selling cocaine and marijuana. His brother ran the business in Mexico, and appellant was in charge of distribution throughout the Houston area. Appellant received the assistance of salesmen in Houston who helped him distribute the drugs. The issue before the Supreme Court in this case centered on whether a trial court must, sua sponte, give an accomplice-witness instruction when the evidence raises the issue under the theory that the witness was a party as a co-conspirator. The Supreme Court answered that question affirmatively. Furthermore, the Court held that when the issue of a trial court's failure to give an accomplice-witness instruction is raised on appeal, a court of appeals should first determine whether a trial court erred by failing to sua sponte give that instruction before it considers whether a defendant preserved his complaint for appeal, a matter that is pertinent to a harm analysis. Because it failed to address the question of charge error in the first instance, the Court held that the appellate court erred by determining that appellant forfeited his jury-charge complaint by failing to request an accomplice-witness instruction that was based specifically on a co-conspirator theory of party liability. This case was remanded to the court of appeals for further proceedings.View "Zamora v. Texas" on Justia Law

Ben Chambless appealed the court of appeals' judgment affirming his sentence of eight years' confinement for committing criminally negligent homicide. Upon careful consideration of the record of this case, the Supreme Court affirmed the court of appeals' conclusion that the jury instructions properly defined the punishment range of a third-degree felony because there was no conflict between the relevant statutes, the state-jail felony deadly-weapon punishment enhancement was applicable to criminally negligent homicide, and its application was not contrary to legislative intent.View "Chambless v. Texas" on Justia Law

Appellant pleaded guilty to burglary of a habitation. The trial court deferred a finding of guilt and placed her on community supervision for a period of five years. The trial court twice extended her term of community supervision and, upon the state's third motion to adjudicate her guilt, assessed punishment at eight years' confinement. On direct appeal, appellant argued that the trial court lacked jurisdiction to revoke her community supervision because the state filed its third motion to adjudicate after her community supervision had expired. The court of appeals overruled these issues and affirmed the trial court's judgment. The Court of Criminal Appeals granted review of two of the three grounds that appellant raised in her petition: (1) whether the trial court lacked jurisdiction to revoke appellant's community supervision because the motion to proceed to adjudicate was filed one day after the seven and one half year period of probation ended; and (2) "[w]hen the trial court pronounces the period of community supervision as being so many years and/or so many months and then the date is not correctly calculated so that the amount of years and/or months and the ending calendar date are [not] the same, which prevails, the announcement of the year and/or months or the calendar date, the longer period regardless of the conflict, the court's intent, or some other method of resolving the conflict?" The Court concluded that its holding in "Nesbit v. Texas" set out the required end-date calculation and controlled in the event of a conflict with a specified end-date. The Court therefore sustained those grounds and reversed the court of appeals' judgment. View "Whitson v. Texas" on Justia Law

Appellant, convicted of money laundering after officers found half a million dollars in cash hidden inside the speaker box of his tractor-trailer, argued on appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeals that the evidence was legally insufficient to prove that the money represented proceeds from the delivery of a controlled substance. The court of appeals, relying in part on a drug-dog alert to the cash, rejected that argument. The narrow question before the Court of Criminal Appeals was whether the conclusion that the cash money in appellant's truck was the proceeds of drug trafficking was warranted by the cumulative force of all the circumstantial evidence. "In isolation, many of the facts relied on by the State could be characterized as only somewhat probative of whether appellant's cache of cash was drug-delivery proceeds. However, we do not consider evidence myopically or point out problems with the individual, separate facts underlying the State's case because all of the evidence-both direct and circumstantial-must be evaluated as a whole by the reviewing court." After reviewing all of the evidence, the Court agreed that the cumulative force of the circumstantial evidence was sufficient to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the cash was the proceeds of the sale of a controlled substance. View "Acosta v. Texas" on Justia Law

A jury convicted appellant of driving while intoxicated. The trial judge denied his motion for new trial, which alleged that outside influences were improperly brought to bear on the jury foreman. The court of appeals held that the trial court abused its discretion in denying appellant's motion for new trial alleging juror misconduct. Because appellant's "outside influence" argument misapplied the Court of Criminal Appeals' holding in McQuarrie v. Texas, the Court granted the State's petition for discretionary review. "Personal pressures [such as a fear of inclement weather or concern about a child's illness] are not 'outside influences' under Texas Rule of Evidence 606(b). Accordingly, juror testimony about these issues is not admissible." Because appellant failed to prove that the jury's verdict was tainted by juror misconduct, the trial judge did not abuse his discretion in denying appellant's motion for new trial. The Court therefore reversed the court of appeals. View "Colyer v. Texas" on Justia Law

In consolidated cases, the issue before the Court of Criminal Appeals centered on an interpretation of the United States Supreme Court's recent decision in Miller v. Alabama, which held that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution forbids sentencing schemes for juveniles in which life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is mandatory rather than based upon an individualized sentencing assessment. Appellants argued that their sentences, which the appellate courts reformed to life imprisonment, were unconstitutional because they were not afforded individualized hearings at which to present mitigating evidence. The Court concluded it did not read Miller so broadly and therefore affirmed the judgment of the appellate courts. View "Lewis v. Texas" on Justia Law

A jury convicted appellant of aggravated robbery and assessed his punishment, enhanced with one prior felony conviction, at seventy-five years' imprisonment. On appeal, appellant argued that the prosecutor willfully violated a pre-trial discovery order and that the trial court erred in failing to exclude from jury consideration the evidence that was wrongfully withheld from his court-ordered pre-trial scrutiny. The court of appeals found that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in concluding that the prosecutor's violation of the discovery order was not willful and that exclusion of the evidence was, therefore, unnecessary. Finding no reversible error, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the court of appeals. View "Francis v. Texas" on Justia Law

The parties agreed that appellant's first name was Peter. At issue in this case were three exhibits that purported to be documentary evidence of prior convictions of a Peter Bruton from the United Kingdom. State's Exhibit 13 consisted of a letter and three "certificates of conviction" purporting to be from the Norwich Crown Court. The letter, addressed to the Denton County District Attorney and signed by a person purporting to be a caseworker from that court, directs the District Attorney to the "enclosed Certificates of Conviction as requested" for a "Peter Bruton" with a date of birth matching appellant's. The certificates of conviction "certify" a "Peter Bruton," with a date of birth matching appellant's, as having a total of twelve convictions for "indecent assault on a female." The letter and the certificates of conviction displayed a depiction of a crown with a lion and a unicorn, and all four documents provided case numbers for the convictions. The certificates of conviction were dated October 2008, and the letter referring to those certificates says that the certificates were enclosed in response to the District Attorney's letter. In this case, the issue before the Court of Criminal Appeals was whether two State's exhibits that purport to be foreign public documents or records were properly authenticated under Rules of Evidence 902(3) and (4). Although the documents met some of the requirements of the rules, the Court held that the documents were not properly authenticated because neither was accompanied by a final certification from a diplomatic or consular official specified in Rule 902(3) and because good cause for failing to obtain a final certification was lacking. View "Brunton v. Texas" on Justia Law