Court Opinion

ID: 9783874
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 20:17:16.613821+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:35:39.734816
License: Public Domain

LEE ANN DAUPHINOT, Justice,
dissenting.
The majority does not address Appellant’s challenge to the trial court’s exclusion of the cell phone’s SIM card and data saved to the cell phone’s hard drive because the majority concludes that Appellant did not address the State’s relevance objection. Respectfully, I cannot agree. The summary of the argument in Appellant’s brief provides,
This evidence was crucial to [Appellant’s] defense as they would likely have established that the victim tampered with evidence by deleting relevant messages. The trial court should have erred on the side of caution and allowed defense counsel leeway to explore more extensively the varying testimony, statements and actions of the victim. Omar’s statements regarding who and [how] many people were involved in the shooting changed from the day he was shot through the day he testified in court. The information he gave police regarding his cell phone activity morphed on the day of trial to include mysterious technical problems never mentioned to police.
The argument portion of Appellant’s brief contains the following statement: “Cell phone communication was key in this case.” Appellant then reiterates the actions of Omar and the attempts of the police to determine the contents of the cell phone and the SIM card. He also reminds this court that when Omar was questioned by defense counsel, he stated that he had had problems with his phone deleting data and that he had told the detectives about the problem. At the same time, Appellant points out, Omar had told defense counsel that on the day of the shooting, he had been making and receiving calls and text messages all day and that the phone’s call log worked properly that day.
Appellant’s brief then states:
As this Court opined in Burleson v. State, . . . .“testifying to missing information and not to specific content cannot be considered hearsay.” Allowing this information would have permitted *740defense counsel to cross reference what information was stored on the phone when the police received it, as compared to what calls and text messages [were] actually sent as per the phone records, thus showing the jury that perhaps some information was removed from the phone prior to police custody for a purpose.
It is true that Appellant did not cite to boilerplate language explaining what relevant evidence is, but Appellant clearly explained the relevance, indeed the importance, of the excluded evidence. I would therefore hold that he does address relevance.
Additionally, the statements of the trial court as well as the discussions of the lawyers with each other and with the trial court show that the basis of the trial court’s ruling was not relevance. It is likely that the scholarly and experienced trial judge concentrated on the hearsay objection to the exclusion of the relevance objection because she is well aware that a relevance objection is a general objection that is the same as no objection at all.7
I would address the merits of Appellant’s argument and determine whether the excluded evidence was inadmissible hearsay. Because the majority does not, I respectfully dissent.

. See Barnard v. State, 730 S.W.2d 703, 716 (Tex.Crim.App.1987), cert. denied, 485 U.S. 929, 108 S.Ct. 1098, 99 L.Ed.2d 261 (1988); Simpson v. State, 507 S.W.2d 530, 534 (Tex.Crim.App.1974) ("[I]t is simply and purely irrelevant to this proceeding. Such an objection is a general objection which is like no objection at all.”) (internal quotation marks omitted).