Court Opinion

ID: 9681454
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 07:50:53.453621+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:34.072567
License: Public Domain

TEAGUE, Judge,
dissenting.
Although Judge Clinton may be absolutely correct when he states in his “Opinion Joining the Judgment of the Court,” that “to dissent is a gesture in futility,” I nevertheless must dissent to what the aggressive and assertive majority opinion does in this case, namely, it destroys many valuable constitutional rights of a defendant, in particular, the right to notice and the right to have a jury decide issues of fact.
Although the applicant was not given any notice in the charging instrument that he used a deadly weapon when he assaulted the complaining witness, and was never put on notice that the jury would make a finding that a deadly weapon was used in the commission of the offense, the aggressive and assertive majority opinion blithely holds that notwithstanding these omissions the jury actually made an affirmative finding that a deadly weapon was used or exhibited in the commission of the offense, albeit nobody, including the jurors, realized that had taken place.
The trial judge’s entering the affirmative finding in its judgment was constitutionally impermissible. I dissent to the majority opinion’s contrary holding. In addition to what I have previously stated, I continue to subscribe to what I stated in the concurring and dissenting opinion that I filed in Polk v. State, 693 S.W.2d 391, 398 (Tex.Cr. App.1985), also see a like opinion that I filed in Gomez v. State, 685 S.W.2d 333, 336 (Tex.Cr.App.1985), and will continue to do so as long as I have a breath of air left in my body because when an appellate court tramples on rights guaranteed in our respective constitutions, as occurs here, someone on that court is duty bound to protest; otherwise, we represent nothing less than what the members of the judiciary in the Weimar Republic became when *529they surrendered their judicial offices to the Nazi High Command.