Court Opinion

ID: 9858459
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 16:24:23.38942+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:54:29.162787
License: Public Domain

TEAGUE, Judge,
concurring and dissenting.
When Mary Shallhorn appealed her conviction to the Fort Worth Court of Appeals, what did she desire that court to do? The answer is quite simple: Mary only wanted that court to review the trial court’s decision overruling her motion to suppress and, of course, hold that the trial court erred in overruling her motion.
What happened to Mary in the court of appeals? Well, it seems that after the court of appeals looked her case over, it told Mary that she must be patient in her desire to get a ruling on the trial court’s decision, and that if she lives long enough she will some day get a review of the trial court’s decision by an intermediate court of appeals. However, the court of appeals also told Mary that the day it handed down its decision was not going to be that day because she must go back to the trial court, relitigate what has already been litigated, and, implicitly, if she is still alive, she can then once again appeal to the court of appeals and, maybe, just maybe, this time she might get that court to review the trial court’s decision. However, if Mary once again pleads guilty, and it is later found by the court of appeals that her plea was involuntary, Mary will get to go back to “go” and start all over.
Just recently, Chief Justice Osborn of the El Paso Court of Appeals in La Belle v. State, 726 S.W.2d 248 (El App.—El Paso 1987), which is another victim of the appellate game of “ping pong justice”, re*640marked: “Judge Learned Hand once noted that he, as a litigant, would dread a law suit beyond almost anything else short of sickness and death. We must wonder if David Wayne La Belle now dreads appeals, and yet another opinion, as much as death. Well, worry not, death may yet come before the last opinion.” (at 250).
I believe that if Mary should happen to meet David, or vice versa, given their common experience they have had to endure in appealing their convictions, the two of them should have an awful lot to talk about. Of course, they should invite the members of this Court to hear their conversation. Who knows? The members of this Court might learn a thing or two.
Although some members of this Court may need this case on their dockets another time, in the posture it presently exists, I, for one, sure don't.
In Broddus v. State, 693 S.W.2d 459, 461 (Tex.Cr.App.1985), in the dissenting opinion that I filed, I made the following remarks: “There has got to be a better way. The majority’s decision not to formulate a better way to handle such a contention as is present in this cause, other than to simply grant a new trial [or, here, affirm the court of appeals’ decision to grant of a new trial], causes the wheels of justice not to move either quickly or forward, but, instead, backwards.” I continue to subscribe to those thoughts and will continue to hope and pray that a majority of this Court will someday, in the not too distant future, find the light switch that will give them light to see the error of their ways.