Court Opinion

ID: 9681880
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 08:00:19.19565+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:36.299190
License: Public Domain

ON STATE’S MOTION FOR REHEARING.
MORRISON, Judge.
The earnest prosecuting attorney has filed a motion for rehearing in which he asserts that the majority and concurring original opinions herein, along with Ex parte Griffin, 158 Tex. Cr. Rep. 570, 258 S. W. 2d 324, on one side are in direct conflict with Ex parte Hayden, 152 Tex. Cr. Rep. 517, 215 S. W. 2d 620, and with Ex parte Wyatt, 29 Tex. App. 398, 16 S. W. 301, on the other.
We do not so view the holdings. If the sheriff in the case at bar had refused to obey the order of the judge to release the relator, this court would, in all probability, have supported him in his position under authority of the Hayden case. This he did not do, but let him go, and now at a later date has arrested relator and seeks to require him to serve his term in jail.
In the Wyatt case it was the prisoner who asked for the leniency which we held the sheriff had no authority to grant him. This was not so in the Griffin case. There the judge sent the officer to bring the prisoner before him, and then told the prisoner to go home just as was done in the case, at bar.
Therein lies the distinction that we tried to make clear in the Griffin ease. • ■ - ' ...
*247Any other holding than that in the Griffin case and this case would be fundamentally unsound for two reasons: (1) It would require one who had requested no relief, but who had been told to leave his place of confinement by those who confined him, to refuse to leave and demand that he be allowed to finish serving his sentence at that time in order to ever be free from the clutches of the law. Such conduct on the part of a prisoner would be inconsistent with human nature as we know it. (2) It would place in the hands of those charged with enforcing the law the power to keep a prisoner in a form of peonage by requiring him to serve his sentence at whatever times and for such length of time as the whim of the officer might dictate.
The state’s motion for rehearing is overruled.