Court Opinion

ID: 9677603
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 05:56:10.55743+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:57.067531
License: Public Domain

ONION, Presiding Judge
(dissenting).
The indictment in the instant case charged in the first count thereof the rape of a mentally diseased woman “she then being so mentally diseased as to have no will to oppose said act of carnal knowledge” and that the appellant “did then and there well know her to be so mentally diseased.” (Emphasis supplied). The second count of the indictment alleged rape by force and threats.
At the close of the State’s case in chief, the court refused to make the State elect which count it would prosecute upon. Although the prosecutrix testified both counts of the indictment were submitted to the jury and they found the appellant guitly of the rape of a mentally diseased woman as charged in the first count.
Recognizing the cases which hold that the prosecutrix in the offense of rape of a mentally diseased woman is an incompetent witness because of her mental condition, the State commences its brief by saying, “The State concedes that this court should exclude the testimony of [complaining witness] in determining the sufficiency of the evidence to prove appellant’s guilt.” This, of course, we cannot do. The State thus finds itself in a predicament.
The majority in a scholarly opinion by Judge Dally finds that the capacity to consent to rape is not to be used as the standard for capacity to testify and overrules all of the old cases holding that the degree of mental disease must be the same as that showing legal insanity, that is — not knowing right from wrong and the nature and consequences of the act. While I have some serious misgivings about the abandonment of the old rule, I do not dissent on this ground.
I do dissent, however, on the sufficiency of the evidence to support the allegation in the indictment that the appellant “did then and there well know her to be so mentally diseased.”
The length of time that appellant had lived in Lamesa is not shown by this record. It was shown that the appellant was a friend of and worked with the pros-ecutrix’s deceased brother. It was shown, however, by the testimony of the prosecu-trix’s father that appellant had never been in the house where the prosecutrix lived *943and had only been outside the house on a few occasions to pick up his deceased son to go to work. The father related that on most occasions that he or his deceased son would pick up the appellant at his home to go to work.
While there was adequate evidence to show that the prosecutrix was mentally retarded, there was no showing that such knowledge had ever been communicated to the appellant. It was shown also that the prosecutrix stayed home most of the time and never did go anywhere except with some member of the family.
I cannot agree that the record supports the jury’s supposed determination by general verdict that the appellant well knew that the prosecutrix did not have the mental capacity to give consent.
Just because neighbors who had known the prosecutrix for many years considered the prosecutrix mentally retarded or that a doctor who examined her thought so, too, does not mean that the appellant possessed such knowledge. There is no showing that the appellant had ever previously seen or even talked to the prosecutrix.
Finding the evidence insufficient, I would reverse. Harris v. State, 474 S.W.2d 706 (Tex.Cr.App.1972).