Court Opinion

ID: 9762030
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 02:08:15.696101+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:29.307368
License: Public Domain

DRAUGHN, Justice,
dissenting.
I dissent. Perhaps as a lone voice in the judicial wilderness who still believes that the responsibility for a criminal to adhere to the terms of his probation, and to be accountable for violations thereof, belongs to the criminal.
Here the criminal stopped reporting to his probation officer and stopped paying the required fees, both of which were conditions he understood and agreed to, and which enabled him to avoid going to prison. Evidence in the record also reflected he was no longer at the address he listed with the probation authorities, another violation of the probation conditions that kept him from being punished for his crime. Further evidence also reflected that he was incarcerated in the State of Florida. All told, there were at least five violations of his probation agreement.
In a strange reversal of common sense, when the admitted law violator pleads “due diligence,” we appellate judges do not review the offending criminal’s conduct to assess whether he should have been punished for violating his probation and thus for the admitted offense which it conditionally shielded. Rather, we examine the conduct of the state by asking, “Did the state use due diligence in finding the criminal who violated his probation?” The statute is clear, due diligence is the standard. But how that standard should be applied in a judicial revocation hearing is not so clear. More specifically, I have difficulty with the majority’s implicit conclusion that to raise the issue of due diligence, all the criminal needs to do is to use the words “due diligence” in his petition. I believe that we should require more of him than that; particularly, when the evidence, as here, indicates that the offender left the state of Texas.
It seems inherently practical to me that, as a minimum, he should be required under such circumstances to show where he was during the time he chose to violate his probation by not reporting. The majority, however, says implicitly that he need do nothing. He does not even have to deny that he didn’t report to his probation officer or failed to pay his required fee. Further, in the face of evidence that he was out of state in violation of his probation, he did not, and indeed, the majority says that he need not, deny that he left the state.
Comparatively, I have less concern with the cases cited by the majority in support of its decision. Harris v. State, 843 S.W.2d 34 (Tex.Crim.App.1992); Rodriguez v. State, 804 S.W.2d 516 (Tex.Crim.App.1991); Langston v. State, 800 S.W.2d 553 (Tex.Crim.App.1990). At least in those cases, each of the offenders developed the issue of due diligence by showing that he was continually at an address in the state of Texas during the period of his probation, and that the address was either known to state officials, or should have been known to them. In spite of which, the state failed to timely arrest the probation violators. Here, even in the face of evidence indicating he was out of state after the capias was issued, appellant was not required to show where he was, a fact uniquely -within his knowledge.
In my opinion, to allow the criminal to stand mute and hide behind the words “due diligence,” puts all of the responsibility and burden in the wrong party in our criminal justice system. In effect, it rewards the clever, devious parole violator by allowing *731him to say by his silence, “if you can’t prove that you did enough to catch me, I go unpunished for my admitted crime whether I’m in the state, out of the state, or presumably out of the country.”
Instead of this try-to-catch-me-soon-or-I-go-free concept, I would opt for one of minimal self-responsibility that requires the criminal, who is faced with contrary evidence as to his whereabouts, which if true constituted a per se violation of his probation, to do something more than just plead the words, to raise and implicate the issue of due diligence. Otherwise, to be completely accurate, probation orders should include the following words: “This probation order is voidable in that you can ignore its terms and go unpunished, provided you can hide out until it expires, plead ‘due diligence’, and provided the authorities are unable to show that they looked hard enough for you.” Hyperbole? Perhaps. But when stripped of its veneer, that is essentially what we have put into effect by our misplaced application of responsibility in probation revocations. We devalue the deterrent effect of probation by our rulings.
I therefore respectfully dissent and register my single judicial vote against this misplaced allocation of criminal responsibility. I would affirm the trial court’s revocation of appellant’s probation.