Court Opinion

ID: 9772222
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 17:10:50.543257+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:31:42.696040
License: Public Domain

ROBERTS, Judge (dissenting):
The majority members of this Court have now effectively emasculated the previous decisions of Ford v. State, 484 S.W. 2d 727. (Tex.Crim.App.1972) and Newman v. State, 485 S.W.2d 576 (Tex.Crim.App.1972). For some unexplained reason, what was good in 1972 is not good in 1974 — that is, the judges who make up this Court today are the very same ones who voted on Ford and Newman, in which there were no dissenting or concurring opinions filed by my brothers on the Court. Attorneys in this State, prosecutors and defense counsel alike are now put on notice that the field of extraneous offenses is now wide open territory once again. The case law in this State regarding the admissibility of extraneous offenses has long been a jumbled mess, totally lacking in consistency and predictability. To any extent that the Ford and Newman cases may have been a step in the right direction for establishing *815some logical rules which attorneys might follow, those decisions have now been rendered ineffective.
The majority decide today that common characteristics are not really that important after all, if the perpetrator of the extraneous offense is identified as the person accused of the primary offense. Doesn’t that completely open the door for a flood of extraneous offenses, thereby defeating the very purpose behind the restrictions in the first place, i. e., that an accused should be tried only for the crime presently charged and not for being a criminal generally? The majority seem to ignore the fact that extraneous offenses have traditionally been admitted as exceptions to this rule, to show common scheme, design, intent, etc., or to rebut alibi. Apparently, the new rule is that the exclusion of these extraneous offenses will be the exception. The majority state that in the present case, both offenses were robberies committed at gunpoint in Dallas, with appellant acting with a companion (though in one case, appellant was acting with the aid of a woman and the other time, a man). The Court finds this sufficient to show a “common mode of the commission of the offenses.”
I quote from Ford v. State, which has been good authority up until now:
“We recognize that there will always be similarities in the commission of the same type of crime. That is, any case of robbery by firearms is quite likely to have been committed in much the same way as any other. What must be shown to make the evidence of the extraneous crime admissible is something that sets it apart from its class or type of crime in general, and marks it distinctively in the same manner as the principal crime, (citations omitted)”
As in Ford, the present case has similarities, “but they are more in the nature of the similarities common to the type of crime itself rather than similarities peculiar to both offenses alone.” Ford, supra, 484 S.W.2d at p. 730.
The majority go further; their holding strengthens a case which contains language that should never have gone into the law books of this State in the first place. I refer to the case of Owens v. State, 450 S.W.2d 324 (Tex.Crim.App.1969), cited by the majority and decided before I was elected to this Court. In citing this case, the majority approve of the overly-broad language contained therein, specifically where it speaks of allowing the introduction of extraneous offenses which “tend” to defeat or discredit the accused’s defensive theory. How could an attorney possibly take this language and speculate with even the slightest degree of accuracy the chances of admitting or keeping out an extraneous offense? Clearly, Owens reached the right result for the wrong reasons. There, the accused was charged with robbing a Pilgrim’s Cleaners on October 14, 1967. The defendant raised the defense of alibi and vigorously contested the issue of identification. The State then offered five witnesses who testified that during this same month, while each was alone in a branch of a Pilgrim’s Cleaners, they were robbed in the same manner as was used in the primary offense. Judge Onion stated that:
“While such testimony may not have directly contradicted the alibi evidence as to appellant’s whereabouts on October 14, 1967, it tended to defeat or discredit such defensive theory and was admissible.” (Emphasis added)
In light of the similarity of the offenses involved and the contested issue of identity, it was completely unnecessary to decide the admissibility of the extraneous offenses on the basis that they “tended” to discredit the defendant’s defensive theory of alibi.
The majority certainly do nothing to clear the air on when extraneous offenses are admissible to rebut an alibi. Under Ford, evidence to rebut an alibi was held to be admissible if it placed the accused at a place where he claimed not to be, or if the evidence showed the impossibility of *816the alibi, even if the two offenses were dissimilar. Whether or not that remains the law is unanswered.
I dissent.
ODOM, J., joins in this dissent.