Court Opinion

ID: 9669194
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 02:42:47.840417+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:53.582854
License: Public Domain

OPINION ON APPELLANT’S MOTION FOR REHEARING
NYE, Chief Justice.
On the original submission of the consolidated appeals, we reversed the convictions for killing a deer in closed season and ordered an acquittal (Chief Justice Nye concurring with written opinion). We affirmed the trial court’s conviction of discharging a firearm on or across a public *840road. In doing so, we overruled appellant’s first ground of error in which he contended that the trial court erred in refusing to instruct the jury that his failure to testify could not be considered as raising an inference of guilt. On Motion for Rehearing, appellant again asserts error in the trial court’s refusal to instruct the jury concerning the appellant’s failure to testify. We now sustain the appellant’s first ground of error and reverse appellant’s conviction for discharging a firearm and remand this case to the trial court.
As noted by our Court of Criminal Appeals in Brown v. State, 617 S.W.2d 234 (Tex.Crim.App.1981), a defendant “has a right to a requested instruction on failure to testify under the privilege against compulsory self-incrimination of the fifth amendment, as made applicable to the states by the fourteenth amendment, at the guilt innocence stage of the trial.”
In all of the four cases involved in this appeal, the trial court did not instruct the jury that it was not to consider the defendant’s failure to testify as raising any inference of guilt. The record shows that appellant’s attorneys objected to the trial court’s failure to so instruct and so assert this error again on motion for rehearing.
We find that the trial court erred. This rule for the requested instruction is mandated by the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Carter v. Kentucky, 450 U.S. 288,101 S.Ct. 1112, 67 L.Ed.2d 241 (1981). The Supreme Court in Carter said:
“The principles enunciated in our cases construing this privilege, against both statutory and constitutional backdrops, lead unmistakably to the conclusion that the- Fifth Amendment requires that a criminal trial judge must give a ‘no-adverse-inference’ jury instruction when requested by a defendant to do so.”
Accordingly, appellant’s motion for rehearing is granted, the conviction for discharging a firearm is reversed, and the cause remanded. Appellant’s convictions for killing deer in closed season are reversed, and the judgments reformed to reflect an acquittal on such charges.
BISSETT, J., not participating.