Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas

The Court held that the court of appeals properly considered Appellant’s preserved but unassigned indictment-notice claim on remand, because the prior remand did not resolve that distinct claim and the court of appeals retained broad authority to address remaining issues.

The court denied habeas relief on all seven claims arising from Applicant's capital-murder conviction and death sentence. It held Claim 1 procedurally barred, rejected the guilt-phase investigation and other ineffective-assistance claims on the merits, and concluded that any deficiency in the mitigation investigation…

The court affirmed the capital-murder conviction and death sentence, rejecting challenges concerning jury selection, the defendant's absence from pretrial status hearings, excluded testimony, lesser-included-offense instructions, penalty-phase evidence, jury deliberations, a mistrial, mitigation instructions, and a…

The Court held that the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause does not apply to a hearing on a motion to enter adjudication of guilt and revoke deferred-adjudication community supervision.

The Court of Criminal Appeals held that the evidence was legally sufficient to support Villa's conviction for engaging in organized criminal activity as a member of the Barrio Azteca street gang.

The Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the Second Court of Appeals and reinstated Gregory Shawn Henley's misdemeanor assault conviction, holding that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in excluding evidence offered to support a defense-of-third-person justification under Penal Code Section 9.33.

The Court held that the evidence was legally sufficient for a rational jury to infer that Ramsey knew the check was forged and passed it with intent to harm or defraud another. It reversed the court of appeals and reinstated the forgery conviction because that court failed to evaluate the combined force of the…

The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the First Court of Appeals' reversal of Gary Patrick Reeves's murder conviction, holding that Reeves suffered 'some harm' under Almanza from a provocation instruction given without any evidentiary support as a qualification on his self-defense claim.

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…

The Court of Criminal Appeals held that the jury charges were erroneous because they permitted non-unanimous verdicts: several distinct incidents of sexual conduct could have satisfied each count, and the boilerplate unanimity instruction did not require the jury to agree on a single incident of criminal conduct.

The court held that the officer lacked reasonable suspicion to stop appellant's truck based on an anonymous report that a man placed two bicycles in a blue Ford pickup and drove away.

The Court of Criminal Appeals held that a defendant's challenge, on insufficiency-of-evidence grounds, to court-appointed attorney fees included in a district clerk's bill of costs is a criminal law matter, because the claim arises over the enforcement of statutes governed by the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure…

The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas reversed the Tyler Court of Appeals and reinstated Gear's bench-trial conviction for attempted burglary of a habitation, holding that a rational fact finder could infer beyond a reasonable doubt that Gear intended to commit theft when he attempted to enter the complainant's home…

The Court of Criminal Appeals conditionally granted the Harris County District Attorney's petitions for writs of mandamus and prohibition to halt a pretrial evidentiary hearing on a capital-murder defendant's motion declaring Texas death-penalty sentencing statute Article 37.071, § 2 unconstitutional 'as applied.' The…

The Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the Corpus Christi Court of Appeals' legal-sufficiency acquittal of former Kleberg County Attorney Alfred Isassi, who was convicted of two counts of improper influence (Tex.

The court held that criminal legal-sufficiency review and the Texas factual-sufficiency standard had become indistinguishable, so it overruled the factual-sufficiency standard and required courts to apply only the constitutional legal-sufficiency standard.

The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas granted discretionary review to resolve whether an Amarillo officer's midnight spotlighting of a pedestrian, coupled with his directive to 'come over here and talk to me,' was a consensual encounter or a Fourth Amendment detention.

In a case of first impression, the Court of Criminal Appeals held that article 38.23 of the Code of Criminal Procedure bars admission of a confession that an interrogating officer obtained by fabricating a forensic fingerprint report in violation of Texas Penal Code section 37.09, because that tampering-with-evidence…

The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the Fourteenth Court of Appeals' judgment denying relief on Oscar Perez Jr.'s claim that trial counsel was ineffective for failing to investigate and present an alibi witness.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held that, viewed in the light most favorable to the trial court's ruling, the record supported implied—if not explicit—consent for Officer Moneada to walk approximately twenty feet down the open hallway to knock on the bathroom door where a suspected runaway was said to be…

The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed appellant's capital murder conviction and death sentence for the August 2006 shooting deaths of Yolanda Styles and Vincent Williams outside a Houston apartment complex.

The court held that Lovill forfeited her selective-prosecution complaint because her statements at the revocation hearing did not specifically identify a constitutional challenge to the initiation of the proceedings and were not timely.

The Court of Criminal Appeals held that a court of appeals does not act inconsistently with Bledsoe when, having concluded that an Anders appeal presents no issues of arguable merit, it explains in its opinion why each raised point lacks merit.

The court held that an unsworn oral motion for a continuance does not preserve a complaint about the denial of that motion for appellate review. It rejected a purported due-process exception because the constitutional right to a meaningful opportunity to present a complete defense is forfeitable when not properly…

The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed John Steven Gardner's capital-murder conviction and death sentence for shooting his wife Tammy Gardner in the course of committing burglary, rejecting all eleven points of error on direct appeal.

The Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the court of appeals, first holding that appellant preserved his challenge to the State's evidence because his hearsay, Sixth Amendment confrontation, and no-sponsoring-witness objections clearly apprised the trial judge, in context, that he objected to resolving the motion to…

The Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the court of appeals, holding that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in denying Johnny Ray Ocon's motion for mistrial after defense counsel overheard a juror talking on a cell phone in the courthouse restroom, complaining about being stuck on the jury.

The Court of Criminal Appeals held that the evidence was legally sufficient to support Villarreal's conviction for violating a protective order even though the order's page-two definition of 'family violence' omitted dating violence: a rational jury, reading the order as a whole in the context of all the evidence and…

The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the First Court of Appeals' judgment upholding Barrios's capital-murder conviction, resolving his petition-for-review ground challenging the trial charge's 'acquittal-first' sequencing instruction.

Holding that error-preservation rules apply with full force, the Court of Criminal Appeals concluded that a defendant may not raise for the first time on appeal a facial challenge to the constitutionality of a statute, rejecting the 'Rabb/Rose' exception as a made-up rule lacking binding support.

The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas held that Jose Luis Pena failed to preserve his claim that the Texas Constitution's due course of law provision affords greater protection than the federal Due Process Clause for lost or destroyed evidence, because he never argued before the trial judge that Article I, Section 19…

The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed Joseph Gamboa's capital murder conviction and death sentence for the 2005 robbery-shootings at San Antonio's Taco Land bar, overruling all eighteen points of error.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held that the trial court acted within its discretion in admitting evidence of two other allegedly fabricated 'buy-bust' police reports at the aggravated-perjury and evidence-tampering trial of former Dallas narcotics detective Mark De La Paz.

The court held that Layton preserved his objection to evidence concerning his Xanax and Valium use because his argument adequately informed the trial court that the evidence required a showing of scientific reliability and relevance.

The Court held that the trial court did not abuse its discretion by denying Amador’s motion to suppress evidence obtained after his warrantless DWI arrest. Considering the totality of the circumstances and reasonable inferences from the officer’s observations, the record supported probable cause to believe Amador was…

The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed Laster's conviction for attempted aggravated kidnapping, holding the evidence legally sufficient and the court of appeals's factual sufficiency analysis correct.

The Court of Criminal Appeals held that Texas Rule of Evidence 803(4) reaches statements made to a licensed professional counselor for mental-health treatment, that the recipient need not be a physician or hold medical qualifications (expressly overruling the Austin Court of Appeals' Moore and Perez to the contrary)…

The Court held that Texas law does not require a jury to unanimously find each aggravating factor of aggravated assault; a unanimous verdict on any one of the disjunctively charged theories suffices, and therefore reversed the Court of Appeals and remanded for further review.

The Court of Criminal Appeals held that the Tenth Court of Appeals lacked jurisdiction to entertain an appeal from the trial court's post-judgment order denying time credit on a 180-day jail condition of community supervision, because no rule, statute, or constitutional provision authorizes such an appeal; appellate…

The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the court of appeals' reversal of Lydia Grotti's criminally negligent homicide conviction as factually insufficient. It held that the hypothetically correct jury charge would have defined "death" under Health & Safety Code § 671.001 rather than the Penal Code, because the Penal…