Case Name: Omar BARRERA, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas
Court: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
Jurisdiction: Texas
Decision Date: 1998-10-07
Citations: 982 S.W.2d 415
Docket Number: No. 1069-97
Parties: Omar BARRERA, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas.
Judges: in which McCORMICK, Presiding Judge, and MANSFIELD, PRICE, HOLLAND and WOMACK, Judges, joined.
Reporter: South Western Reporter Second Series
Volume: 982
Pages: 415–419

Head Matter:
Omar BARRERA, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas.
No. 1069-97.
Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas, En Banc.
Oct. 7, 1998.
Rene B. Gonzalez, Brownsville, for appellant.
John A. Olson, Asst. County Atty., Brownsville, Matthew Paul, State’s Atty., Austin, for State.

Opinion:
OPINION ON STATE'S PETITION FOR DISCRETIONARY REVIEW
KELLER, Judge,
delivered the opinion of the Court
in which McCORMICK, Presiding Judge, and MANSFIELD, PRICE, HOLLAND and WOMACK, Judges, joined.
A Cameron County grand jury returned a single indictment charging appellant, Omar Barrera, with attempted murder and aggra vated assault for the shooting of Oscar Za-rate. Appellant pleaded not guilty before a jury to both charges. The jury found appellant guilty of attempted murder and the trial court sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. After a motion for new trial, the trial court reduced appellant's sentence to ten years. On appeal, appellant claimed, inter alia, that the trial court erred in failing to apply the law of self-defense to the facts of the case and in failing to instruct the jury that a reasonable doubt on the issue of self-defense required acquittal. See Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 2.03(d) (Vernon 1994). The court of appeals agreed that the trial court erred, and then analyzed that error under the federal harmless error rule because "we do not apply Almanza . if the error implicates rights flowing from the United States Constitution." Barrera v. State, 951 S.W.2d 153, 157 (Tex.App.— Corpus Christi 1997). Finding the error harmful under this standard, the court of appeals reversed appellant's conviction and remanded for a new trial.
The State petitioned this Court for review, taking issue with the court of appeals' holding that the omission in the jury charge was fundamental error. The State asks us to consider whether Almanza is the proper standard for review. We granted review to determine the proper standard for review when, in the absence of an objection, a jury charge includes the definition of self-defense but fails to contain self-defense in the application paragraph.
I.
Because appellant failed to either request a self-defense instruction or object to the instruction given, this case implicates our recent decision in Posey v. State, 966 S.W.2d 57 (Tex.Crim.App.1998). Posey claimed that the trial court erred in omitting a jury instruction on mistake of fact, even though he had neither requested the charge nor objected to its omission. The court of appeals agreed and remanded the case after determining that Posey had been egregiously harmed under the standard set forth in Almanza v. State, 686 S.W.2d 157 (Tex.Crim.App.1984). See Posey, 966 S.W.2d at 59. On the State's petition for discretionary review, this court reversed the court of appeals, holding that the omission of an unobjected-to (or unrequested) defensive instruction is not "error" under Almanza. Id. at 62.
This case presents a different issue from that in Posey, however. Rather than omitting an instruction altogether, the trial court in this case failed to apply an abstract instruction to the facts of the case. That is to say, even without a request, the trial court included the law of self-defense in the charge to the jury. A trial court has no duty to sua sponte charge the jury on unrequested defensive issues raised by the evidence. See Posey, 966 S.W.2d at 62. However, having undertaken on its own to charge the jury on this issue, the trial court in this case signaled that self-defense was "the law applicable to the case." Therefore, any flaw in the charge on self-defense amounts to an error in the charge, even under the reasoning of Posey. The court of appeals properly concluded that the failure to apply the law of self-defense to the facts of the case and to instruct the jury to acquit if they held a reasonable doubt on self-defense was error.
II.
Having found the above-mentioned error, the court of appeals erroneously concluded that it was a federal constitutional error and applied the harm analysis appropriate to such errors. In reaching their conclusion, the court of appeals cited to a series of pre-Almanza charge error cases. In Doyle v. State, 631 S.W.2d 732 (Tex.Crim.App.1980), without support from federal caselaw, this Court held that the failure of a charge to apply the law to the facts of a case violated the federal constitution in two regards:
First, it 'goes to the very basis of the cases' and denies 'the fair and impartial trial to which (defendants) are entitled under the . due process provision! ] of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution . Second, the failure of the charge to apply the law to the facts 'impairs the right to trial by jury .,' which [is] guaranteed by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution....
Id. at 736 (citing Ex parte Clark, 597 S.W.2d 760, 761 (Tex.Crim.App.1980)) (citations omitted).
However, our recent decisions have questioned this understanding of the importance of a procedurally perfect jury charge. In Malik v. State, we overruled the line of Texas cases that had held that the jury charge absolutely controls an appellate court's assessment of evidentiary sufficiency (the so-called Benson/Boozer doctrine). Malik v. State, 958 S.W.2d 234 (Tex.Crim.App.1997). We instead concluded that the proper measure of sufficient evidence was the "hypothetically correct jury charge":
Such a charge would be one that accurately sets out the law, is authorized by the indictment, does not unnecessarily increase the State's burden of proof or unnecessarily restrict the State's theories of liability, and adequately describes the particular offense for which the defendant was tried.
Id. at 240. We pointed to authorities which had signaled the decline of the importance of the application paragraph of a charge, as well; for example, we acknowledged our recent observation that "it may well be that application paragraphs are an anachronism, and that jurors could perform just as well without them." Id. at 238 (quoting Plata v. State, 926 S.W.2d 300, 304 (Tex.Crim.App.1996)).
Moreover, we pointed out in Malik that the Benson/Boozer doctrine found no real support in federal caselaw. Malik, 953 S.W.2d at 239. The same caselaw that led us to our conclusion in Malik supports the conclusion that the failure to apply the law of a case to its facts does not amount to a federal constitutional error, but is merely "a technical violation of [a] state-law rule." Brown v. Collins, 937 F.2d 175, 182 (5th Cir.), rehearing en banc denied, 945 F.2d 403 (1991). This conclusion naturally follows from federal decisions which have concluded that "[n]or-mally . instructions to the jury in state trials are matters of state law and procedure not involving federal constitutional issues." United States ex. rel. Waters v. Bensinger, 507 F.2d 103, 105 (7th Cir.1974) (quoting Grundler v. North Carolina, 283 F.2d 798, 802 (4th Cir.1960)). Federal courts considering habeas petitions have announced narrow guidelines for jury charge error that offends the federal constitution:
[W]hen reviewing a jury charge for constitutional infirmity, we must consider the challenged portion of the charge not "in artificial isolation," but rather "in the context of the overall charge." Cupp v. Naughten, 414 U.S. 141, 146-47, 94 S.Ct. 396, 400, 38 L.Ed.2d 368 (1973). A constitutional violation occurs only if "[tjhere is a reasonable likelihood that the jury understood the instructions to allow conviction on proof insufficient to meet the Winship standard." Victor v. Nebraska, 511 U.S. 1, 6, 114 S.Ct. 1239, 1243, 127 L.Ed.2d 583 (1994).
Justice v. Hoke, 45 F.3d 33, 34 (2nd Cir.1995). A trial court's failure to apply an otherwise correct defensive jury instruction does not give rise to such a likelihood. Accordingly, the error in this case did not implicate the federal constitution.
III.
Notwithstanding the absence of constitutional error in this case, the trial court did err in its charge to the jury. See Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 2.03(d) (Vernon 1994) ("If the issue of the existence of a defense is submitted to the jury, the court shall charge that a reasonable doubt on the issue requires that the defendant be acquitted"). The review of such errors is controlled by Texas Code of Criminal Procedure article 36.19 ("Review of Charge on Appeal") and our decision in Almanza v. State, 686 S.W.2d 157 (Tex.Crim.App.1984). Under Almanza, an appellant who complains on appeal of an unobjected-to error in the charge "will obtain a reversal only if the error is so egregious and created such harm that he 'has not had a fair and impartial trial'— in short 'egregious harm.'" Id. at 171. As discussed above, appellant neither requested a self-defense charge nor objected to the charge as given. Therefore, we remand this cause to the court of appeals to allow them to conduct an "egregious harm" analysis under Almanza.
BAIRD, J., files a dissenting opinion in which OVERSTREET, J., joined.
MEYERS, J., files a dissenting opinion in which OVERSTREET, J., joins.