Court Opinion

ID: 9664415
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 00:18:48.323445+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:06.204468
License: Public Domain

DAVIDSON, Judge,
dissenting.
When counsel for the state inquired, upon cross-examination of a witness who had attested appellant’s good reputation as a peaceable and law-abiding citizen, as to specific acts of misconduct on the part of appellant, he violated the long-established rule which holds that such questioning is reversbile error. The authorities so holding are numerous. See: Parrish v. State, 163 Texas Cr. Rep. 252, 290 S.W. 2d 245; Prater v. State, 104 Texas Cr. Rep. 669, 284 S.W. 965; McNaulty v. State, 138 Texas Cr. Rep. 317, 135 S.W. 2d 987; Wharton v. State, 157 Texas Cr. Rep. 326, 248 S.W. 2d 739; Davis v. State, 160 Texas Cr. Rep. 138, 268 S.W. 2d 152.
When the trial court overruled the objection of appellant’s counsel to the question propounded, he did so in open violation of the rule stated and the attesting authorities.
Thus, two positive errors were committed: that by the state’s counsel in asking the question, and that by the trial court in overruling the objection and thereby permitting the question and the implications cast thereby to remain with the jury for consideration.
As I understand it, the majority opinion concedes the errors mentioned.
The holding of the majority is that appellant’s counsel waived the errors by not going further and moving the trial court to withdraw the question and answer from the consideration of the jury after his objection thereto had been overruled.
The doctrine of waiver, by an accused, of a valuable right in the trial of a criminal case ought not to be looked to with favor. It should be applied only when some good and sufficient reason exists therefor and such reason is made plainly manifest.
The presumption of innocence which follows all criminal trials is adverse to the idea of waiver, by an accused, of his right to be tried in accordance with law.
*344Here, the trial court had overruled the objection of appellant’s counsel and had thereby permitted the question and answer to remain with the jury for all purposes.
Was there anything to suggest that a motion to withdraw the question from the jury would be granted in the face of the holding that the question and answer were admissible and not subject to valid objection? I submit that there was not. By any stretch of the imagination can it be reasonably asserted that appellant’s counsel could have accomplished anything by moving to have the question withdrawn? Certainly it cannot.
So then, the motion which the appellant’s counsel was here required to make was perfectly useless and in no event could it have benefited the appellant. The only possible use the motion could have had was to magnify before the jury the question and answer and the appellant’s objection thereto and the error in asking the question.
Therefore, by failing to do a useless and wholly unavailing thing, the appellant waives, and by that waiver forfeits, the positive error committed in the trial of the case. Such is what the majority opinion holds and such is the basis upon which this conviction is affirmed.
Had the trial court sustained the objection, there might be some reason to require the motion to withdraw if the question or testimony sought to have withdrawn was such that the withdrawal could have cured any error in the first instance. Such, however, is not the case here. Here, the objection was overruled. The question and answer remained with the jury.
Considering the holding in the majority opinion as an overall picture, I cannot help but wonder if we have not gotten to the point, in this state, where the trial of a criminal case has become a battle between opposing counsel over legal technicalities or purely procedural matters rather than a proceeding to determine if one accused of crime is guilty of the crime charged and has been accorded a trial in accordance with law.
It must be remembered that it is not appellant’s counsel— whom the majority opinion unjustly, to my mind, convicts of a failure to make the motion to withdraw — who is going to the penitentiary for five years in this case. It is the appellant who is going to serve that punishment, not because he failed to do a perfectly useless thing but because his counsel did.
*345I cannot agree to the affirmance of this case in the face of positive errors.
I respectfully dissent.