In The

Court of Appeals

Sixth Appellate District of Texas at Texarkana

No. 06-15-00146-CR

CHASE CRAIG HUDSON, Appellant

V.

THE STATE OF TEXAS, Appellee

On Appeal from the 8th District Court

Hopkins County, Texas

Trial Court No. 1424247

Before Morriss, C.J., Moseley and Burgess, JJ.

Memorandum Opinion by Justice Moseley
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MEMORANDUM OPINION

After Chase Craig Hudson’s altercation with his eighty-seven-year-old step-grandfather, 

Bobby Casey, Hudson was charged with the third degree felony of injury to an elderly person. A 

Hopkins County jury found Hudson guilty of the charge and, since the penalty was enhanced to 

the status of a second degree felony due to Hudson’s prior convictions (to which Hudson pled 

“true”), Hudson was sentenced to twenty years’ confinement. 

Hudson raised a singular point on appeal, that being that the trial court erred in refusing to 

grant a requested instruction of “consent” (sometimes called “mutual combat”1). We determine 

that the trial court did not commit error in refusing to include the requested instruction, and we 

affirm Hudson’s judgment of conviction.

I. Background

The story of the conflict between Bobby and Hudson is one of two different tales. One of 

these tales is the rendition of the interaction that unfolds as it occurs; the other tale of the conflict 

is quite different when told in court by Bobby and Marie Casey, Hudson’s step-grandfather and 

grandmother.

It is uncontested from both viewpoints that a mid-thirty-aged, single Hudson had no job 

and was living in a spare bedroom of the Casey home. A long-standing dispute existed between 

the residents of the house and their supplier of electricity because the Caseys believed the electrical 

 

1See Garza-Ramirez v. State, Nos. 04-15-00420-CR & 04-15-00421-CR, 2016 Tex. App. LEXIS 2938 (Tex. App.—

San Antonio Mar. 23, 2016, no pets.) (mem. op., not designated for publication).
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utility costs to be much higher than was justified. For reasons not explained, a padlock had been 

placed on a utility box which appears to have contained the electrical usage meter.

As Marie was on the telephone with a representative of the electrical utility on August 4, 

2014, Hudson entered the house with his friend, Chris Burney. Hudson was apparently being loud 

and Bobby tried to quiet him so Marie’s attempts at telephone discussion would not be impaired. 

Bobby also was attempting to either obtain the key to the lock on the box covering the electrical 

meter or was attempting to have Hudson remove it, but Hudson was recalcitrant. The conflict 

between Bobby and Hudson escalated. It is at this juncture that the versions of the events diverge.

According to the story told on that day by the Caseys to peace officers and to the 9-1-1 

operator, the verbal conflict between Hudson and Bobby progressed to a physical tussle between

them. As they grappled, Hudson slammed Bobby into a wall, and the two of them fell together on 

the floor after they tripped over a dog bowl. While on the floor, Hudson struck Bobby repeatedly 

in the face with a cell phone. Alarmed, Marie placed a call to the 9-1-1 emergency number and 

said that police were needed. 

Upon the arrival of the police, they found a bloodied Bobby sitting in a chair in the living 

room (as it developed, Bobby had suffered only a small scratch on his nose and suffered no other

known ill effects). The first-arriving policeman was told that Hudson had gone to his bedroom 

and locked the door and that he was possibly armed with a .45 caliber handgun. The policeman 

could not get Hudson to respond. More policemen arrived, including a hostage negotiator and the 

head of the Sulphur Springs police SWAT2team. Although the Caseys provided the police with 

 

2SWAT is an acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics.
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two telephone numbers of cell phones owned by Hudson, the police could get no response to calls 

placed to either of those telephones. After some delay, the police encouraged Hudson to exit the 

bedroom by introducing tear gas into the room. Hudson was arrested and charged with injury to 

Bobby, an elderly person.3See TEX. PENAL CODE ANN. § 22.04(f) (West Supp. 2015).

According to Marie’s testimony at trial, when she placed the 9-1-1 call which prompted 

the police to intervene, she did so only because she “overreacted” to the conflict between Bobby 

and Hudson. Although the recording of the 9-1-1 call clearly indicates that Hudson took the 

telephone receiver from Marie without her consent, she testified at trial that she willingly gave the 

telephone to him. She also testified that she should have known that Hudson was only joking 

around after the police arrived when he said that he had a gun in his room and that the police should 

not enter it. Marie said that Bobby was at fault for the tussle with Hudson, Bobby having instigated 

the ruckus. 

By his testimony at trial, Bobby said that although he previously stated that Hudson had 

repeatedly slapped him in the face with a cell phone, that statement was in error. Rather, Bobby 

changed his description of the conduct to say that Hudson had merely “brushed” his face with it 

several times. Bobby also stated that although Hudson had told Bobby during the argument 

preceding the physical confrontation that he was going to “whip [his] butt” and “break [his] neck,” 

it was Bobby who had initiated the conflict. The Caseys attempted more than once to have the 

charges against Hudson dropped. 

 

3An “[e]lderly individual” is “a person 65 years of age or older.” TEX. PENAL CODE ANN. § 22.04(c)(2) (West Supp. 

2015).
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The Caseys’ daughter (Hudson’s mother) and granddaughter (Hudson’s cousin) testified 

that they each believed that both of the Caseys would lie to protect Hudson and that they believed 

the Caseys to be prevaricating in their testimony in order to shield Hudson from the consequences 

of his attack on Bobby. 

II. Applicability of Defense of Consent (or Mutual Combat) 

However, neither the quality nor the quantity of the evidence is in issue in the case because 

the sufficiency of the evidence has not been challenged on appeal. The issue raised by Hudson 

revolves around the instruction which Hudson requested in writing to be included in the jury 

charge. The requested instruction read, “You are instructed that the [sic] Bobby Casey’s effective 

consent or the reasonable belief of Chase Craig Hudson that Bobby Casey consented to the conduct 

of Chase Craig Hudson is a defense to the charge of Injury to an Elderly Person as contained in 

the Indictment in this cause.” 

The above request was based upon the testimony of both Bobby and Marie that Bobby had 

initiated the physical confrontation between Bobby and Hudson, together with the defense set out 

in Section 22.06(a) of the Texas Penal Code, which provides that

(a) The victim’s effective consent or the actor’s reasonable belief that 

the victim consented to the actor’s conduct is a defense to prosecution under Section 

22.01 (Assault), 22.02 (Aggravated Assault), or 22.05 (Deadly Conduct) if:

(1) the conduct did not threaten or inflict serious bodily injury; 

or

(2) the victim knew the conduct was a risk of:

(A) his occupation;

(B) recognized medical treatment; or
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(C) a scientific experiment conducted by recognized 

methods.

See TEX. PENAL CODE ANN. § 22.06(a) (West 2011).

The trial court pointed out that the statute specifically allows the imposition of that defense 

to both accusations of common assault and aggravated assault as well as an accusation of the 

commission of deadly conduct but not to the offense of which Hudson was charged. The trial 

court ruled that the defense of consent was not available to a defendant charged in an offense 

described in Section 22.04 of the Texas Penal Code. 

Hudson argued both at trial and on appeal that the defense of consent applies to all 

assaultive defenses, not just to those enumerated in Section 22.06(a), arguing that the trial court’s 

interpretation of the statute is overly narrow. 

The duty of the courts in construing legislation is plain. 

The overarching rule of statutory construction is that we construe a statute in 

accordance with the plain meaning of its text unless the text is ambiguous or the 

plain meaning leads to absurd results that the legislature could not possibly have 

intended. When a statute is unambiguous, the courts should not add to or subtract 

from it.

Ex parte Vela, 460 S.W.3d 610, 612 (Tex. Crim. App. 2015) (citation omitted). 

Surely, it would have been simple enough for the Legislature to have worded Section 22.06 

of the Texas Penal Code in such a way that the defense applied to all assaultive offenses (as urged 

by Hudson here) or to have simply added Section 22.04 to the relatively short list of offenses for 

which the defense of “consent” is available. The Legislature chose to adopt neither of these means 

to expand the application of the defense. We can only assume that the Legislature believes that 

the defense of consent is not appropriate for the kind of offenses set out in Section 22.04, opting 
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to treat the elderly, children, and disabled persons as victims in a different fashion than the rest of 

the population. To add this offense to those the Legislature enumerated would be a violation of a 

primary rule of statutory construction. 

Even should the Legislature’s enumeration of the applicability of the defense of consent to 

only some assaultive offenses be ignored, this defense would still be unavailable to Hudson under 

the facts of this case. It was uncontested that Hudson threatened during the physical encounter to 

break Bobby’s neck. A threat to break someone’s neck is an unvarnished threat of serious bodily 

injury. That threat alone would render the applicability of the defense of consent inapplicable. 

See TEX. PENAL CODE ANN. § 22.06(a)(1).

We reject Hudson’s argument and hold that the trial court was correct in refusing to submit 

the requested instruction. We affirm the conviction of Hudson.

Bailey C. Moseley

Justice

Date Submitted: March 28, 2016

Date Decided: April 27, 2016

Do Not Publish