Mark De La Paz, Appellant v. the State of Texas

Summary

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 extraneous-offense evidence was admissible, first, for the noncharacter purpose of rebutting De La Paz's defensive theory that the State's star witnesses were lying about the specific events at issue, and, second, under Wigmore's 'doctrine of chances,' because his claim that he alone saw the informant's contact with the victim became objectively implausible once two nearly identical claims surfaced. The Court further sustained the trial court's Rule 403 ruling that unfair prejudice did not substantially outweigh the evidence's high probative value on the falsity of De La Paz's statements and his knowledge of that falsity, reversed the court of appeals' judgment, and remanded for resolution of the remaining appellate issues.