Second Court of Appeals | Case Summaries

Summaries of Civil Opinions and Published Criminal Opinions Issued – Week of April 16, 2007

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 can be accessed by clicking the cause number then clicking View HTML Version of Opinion.

Sarabia v. State, No. 02-06-00049-CR, 02-06-00106-CR (Apr. 19, 2007) (Gardner, J., joined by Cayce, C.J., and McCoy, J.).: Held: The trial court did not err by admitting evidence of child pornography in Appellant's trial for aggravated sexual assault of a minor. The extraneous-offense evidence was admissible under rule of evidence 404(b) as evidence of Appellant’s motive or intent to gratify his sexual desires via underage boys, and the prejudicial effect of the evidence did not substantially outweigh its probative value under rule 403.
City of Cresson, Texas v. City of Granbury, Texas, No. 02-06-00227-CV (Apr. 19, 2007) (Livingston, J., joined by Dauphinot and Holman, JJ.).: Held: The common law first-in-time rule, which allowed cities to acquire jurisdiction over land merely by instituting annexation proceedings and which was partially supplanted by the Municipal Annexation Act of 1963 (currently located in chapter 43 of the local government code) does not govern Granbury's claims that it acquired jurisdiction over four tracts of land that were originally not included within any city's extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ) to the exclusion of Cresson merely by proposing to annex those tracts, along with a tract of land already included in its ETJ, in immediate sequential order during the same council session. In this situation, the first-in-time rule does not operate as a gapfiller to the current statutory scheme, which prohibits a city from annexing property unless it is already included within its then-existing ETJ. Granbury could not acquire ETJ over the four disputed tracts until it annexed the first tract of land that was included within its ETJ; by the time Granbury enacted its first ordinance, it could no longer acquire ETJ in the four disputed tracts because Cresson had already voted to include the four disputed tracts within its ETJ in accordance with a petition filed by the landowners under local government code section 42.022(b).