Jeffrey Shane Wise, Appellant v. the State of Texas

Summary

On the State's petition for discretionary review, the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the Fort Worth court of appeals, which had held the evidence legally insufficient to support appellant Jeffrey Shane Wise's ten convictions for possessing child-pornography images recovered from the free space of his computer hard drive. The Court held that the court of appeals misapplied the Jackson v. Virginia standard by reviving the abrogated reasonable-hypothesis construct—crediting possible virus and prior-owner explanations—instead of asking whether the jury's inferences were reasonable based on the cumulative force of all the evidence viewed in the light most favorable to the verdict. Viewed that way, the evidence of Wise's history of sexually assaulting children, the child erotica and temporary internet files referencing child pornography on his computer, and the implausibility of the alternative explanations permitted a rational jury to infer that he knowingly possessed the deleted images before deletion. The Court therefore rendered judgment affirming the trial court.