Court Opinion

ID: 9677800
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 06:00:17.075629+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:58.598830
License: Public Domain

LEVY, Justice,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent.
Appellant’s two grounds of error come too closely after Blanton v. State, 633 S.W.2d 903 (Tex.Cr.App.1982), for me not to consider the distinction drawn by the majority to be vexatious. The problem here is to determine whether counsel’s trial objection had the requisite specificity to be within the penumbra of Blanton, while simultaneously avoiding the generality condemned by Hernandez v. State, 599 S.W.2d 614 (Tex.Cr.App.1980).
Unlike Hernandez, the appellant here explicitly identified the two documents complained of, and objected that “... the motion to revoke is not any judgment upon which the State may rely to prove a final conviction in this cause.” The majority’s insistence on the fatality of the omission of the phrase “extraneous offense” from the objection appears to me to require a semantic precision more appropriate to a mathematical treatise than to the tension and conflict of a contested criminal proceeding. It appears to me that the counsel’s trial objection was not perfectly comprehensive, but gave fair and adequate notice to the trial court as to the erroneous character of admitting the two pen packets. Intensifying the unfairness to the appellant is the record’s showing that the prosecutor specifically called the jury’s attention to the motion to revoke during jury argument.
Appellant here was subject to the automatic application of § 12.42(d) of the Penal Code upon the jury’s affirmation of the two enhancement allegations, and hence we cannot verify the presence of punishment prejudice by the degree of punishment assessed by the jury. But I cannot say that the admission of the motion to revoke probation, and the order revoking probation, both contained in the pen packet, did not improp*154erly influence or suggest to the jury to find both prior enhancements “true.”
I would reverse and remand for a new trial.