Second Court of Appeals
Summaries of Civil Opinions and Published Criminal Opinions Issued - Week of January 5, 2015
NOTE: Summaries are prepared by the court's staff attorneys and law clerks for public information only and reflect his or her interpretation alone of the facts and legal issues. The summaries are not part of the court's opinion in the case and should not be cited to, quoted, or relied upon as the opinion of the court.
Links to full text of opinions (PDF version) can be accessed by clicking the cause number.
Burks v. State, No. 02-13-00560-CR (Jan. 8, 2015) (Walker, J., joined by Meier and Gabriel, JJ.).
Held: The trial court erred by denying Burks’s motion to suppress blood alcohol test results obtained using the mandatory-blood-draw procedure of the Texas Transportation Code and without Burks’s consent or a valid search warrant.
Ex parte Roberson, No. 02-13-00582-CR (Jan. 8, 2015) (Gardner, J., joined by Walker, J.; Dauphinot, J., dissents with opinion)
Held: Because the record supported the State’s assertion that its investigator did not intentionally goad the defendant into moving for a mistrial, the trial court did not abuse its discretion by denying the defendant’s pretrial application for writ of habeas corpus.
Dissent: The record does not support the State’s assertion that it did not intentionally goad Appellant into moving for a mistrial. Nothing justified the experienced investigator’s accosting a sitting juror and telling her, ‟You were struck, but then we got you on.” The resulting mistrial removed a barrier to the admission of State-proffered extraneous offense evidence previously deemed inadmissible on notice grounds.
Dowden v. State, No. 02-14-00195-CR (Jan. 8, 2015) ((Walker, J., joined by Meier and Gabriel, JJ.).
Held: The State was not required to prove that Dowden did not have a valid prescription or order of a practitioner because that is not an element of the offense of possession of a controlled substance under section 481.116 of the health and safety code; instead, it is an exception that Dowden had the burden to present evidence on, and he failed to satisfy his burden of bringing forth evidence with respect to the valid-prescription exception; trial counsel was not ineffective by failing to raise the defensive issue of the valid-prescription exception.