Court Opinion

ID: 9682649
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 08:15:14.034537+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:40.578949
License: Public Domain

CLINTON, Judge,
dissenting.
Constitutionally and statutorily the State of Texas is prohibited from twice putting an accused in jeopardy.1 Convicted of the felony offense of riot, denounced by V.T. *157C.A. Penal Code, § 42.02, the second time he was tried on the same indictment, which also alleged the felony offense of aggravated assault on a peace officer, defined by id., § 22.02(a)(2), appellant premises all his four grounds of error on the facts that prosecution on the count alleging riot had been abandoned by the State just before the case was submitted to the jury at the first trial, and that the jury was properly discharged when it manifested the altogether improbability that it could agree on a verdict with respect to aggravated assault on a peace officer.
Thus, appellant contends the trial court erred in denying his pretrial motion to quash the indictment insofar as it alleged riot, in overruling his motion that the prosecution be required to elect before trial which one of two counts would be tried, in thereafter allowing the prosecution to abandon the count of aggravated assault and, lastly, in submitting to the jury only riot. The question presented, then, is what remains in an indictment that may be prosecuted again after the State has elected to abandon its first count and is unable to convince a jury to find an accused guilty of the offense alleged in the second count. The answer, of course, is one of law.
Jeopardy attached when the jury in the first trial had been empaneled and sworn. Crist v. Bretz, 437 U.S. 28, 98 S.Ct. 2156, 57 L.Ed.2d 24 (1978). But, in the ordinary case, “retrial is not automatically barred when a criminal proceeding is terminated without finally resolving the merits of the charges against the accused,” Arizona v. Washington, 434 U.S. 497, 98 S.Ct. 824, 54 L.Ed.2d 717 (1978). That a jury is unable to agree on its verdict is a “classic example” of a happening that will not preclude a second trial, Downum v. United States, 372 U.S. 734, 736, 83 S.Ct. 1033, 1034, 10 L.Ed.2d 100 (1963), and that matter is regulated by statute in this State. See Article 36.31, V.A.C.C.P. and, e.g., Bowles v. State, 606 S.W.2d 875 (Tex.Cr.App.1980). In this kind of “manifest necessity” for declaring a mistrial, the jeopardy that had once attached becomes, so to speak, unattached, and our statute provides that “the cause may be again tried,” Article 36.33, V.A.C.C.P. United States v. Sanford, 429 U.S. 14, 97 S.Ct. 20, 50 L.Ed.2d 17 (1976).
What is before the Court now, however, is not an ordinary case. Appellant urges that the issue presented has already been resolved by the Court, early and late, in a number of decisions cited in his brief. They run from Mizell v. State, 83 Tex.Cr.R. 305, 203 S.W. 49 (1918), through Ex parte Seelies, 511 S.W.2d 300 (Tex.Cr.App.1974), which cites many more, to Patterson v. State, 581 S.W.2d 696 (Tex.Cr.App.1979); but in each the accused was convicted of an offense other than the one abandoned at some point in the proceeding.2 The matter appears to be one of first impression in this State.
The principle at work in the line of cases relied on by appellant is that when the merits of at least one of the charges on trial has been resolved against the accused, and the others have not been effectively withdrawn from consideration by the jury, a general verdict of guilty leaves the trial court uncertain as to which offense its judgment should adjudicate guilt of the defendant. Jones v. State, supra, at 544; Walker v. State, 473 S.W.2d 499, 500 (Tex.Cr.App.1971). But when none of the charges has been resolved on the merits, a general proposition of Jeopardy law is that retrial of the cause is not barred, and Article 36.33, supra, is in accord with that if mistrial has been declared because the jury *158was unable to agree on a verdict. The cause thus stands as if it had never been tried, and the State is, as it should be, allowed second opportunity to persuade another jury to return a verdict of guilty on whichever count of the indictment is ultimately submitted. See Stanley v. State, 625 S.W.2d 320, 323-324 (Tex.Cr.App.1981).
Accordingly, I conclude that the trial court did not err in any of the particulars asserted by appellant, and would perforce overrule his four grounds of errors.
However, the majority concludes that the trial court erred in denying appellant’s pretrial motion to quash the indictment insofar as it alleged riot. To reach that result the majority utilizes the doctrine of “manifest necessity” in a manner that, I must say frankly, is alien to the jeopardy jurisprudence of this State and of the Supreme Court of the United States. That is, a determination must be made “whether there was any showing by the State of any manifest or imperative necessity that would have warranted the trial court not submitting the riot count of the indictment to the jury at the first trial.”
The “manifest necessity” doctrine, while not a precise formulation, is the test to examine exercise by a trial court of its discretionary authority “to discharge a jury from giving any verdict,” United States v. Perez, 9 Wheat 579, 580, 6 L.Ed. 165 (1824), the declaration being made “over the objection of the defendant,” Arizona v. Washington, 434 U.S. 497, 505, 98 S.Ct. 824, 830, 54 L.Ed.2d 717 (1978). Compare United States v. Jorn, 400 U.S. 470, 91 S.Ct. 547, 27 L.Ed.2d 543 (1971). So far as has been ascertained neither this Court nor the Supreme Court has deemed the doctrine a measure for deciding whether a trial court is justified in withholding one or more counts of an indictment from consideration by the jury, and the majority finds no support for its twisting the square of manifest necessity into the round hole of submission of counts to a jury. Conceptually the two simply will not fit.
Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.
Before the court en banc.

. Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, made applicable to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment by Benton v. Maryland, 395 U.S. 784, 89 S.Ct. 2056, 23 L.Ed.2d 707 (1969); § 14, Bill of Rights, Article I, Constitution of the State of Texas; Articles 1.10 and 1.11, V.A.C.C.P.

. Black v. State, 143 Tex.Cr.R. 318, 158 S.W.2d 795 (1942) is illustrative of the rule applied in that situation, which the Court quotes from Texas Jurisprudence:
“Where a defendant has been tried on several counts and convicted under one he is thereby acquitted of the others, and may not later be tried upon the ones for which he was so acquitted. Thus where there are several counts in an indictment and only one is submitted to the jury, this amounts to an acquittal upon the abandoned counts, and the defendant may not upon a subsequent trial be prosecuted on the abandoned counts.” (All emphasis is mine unless otherwise indicated.)
That rationale still obtains in this Court, as Jones v. State, 586 S.W.2d 542, 544 (Tex.Cr.App.1979) demonstrates.