Court Opinion

ID: 9645899
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 21:39:31.013005+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:11:32.698221
License: Public Domain

CLINTON, Judge,
dissenting.
Once again a majority acts like this cause is before the Court on direct appeal. Although it recognizes the reason for decision given by the Houston (1st) Court of Appeals, see Article 44.24(b), V.A.C.C.P., the majority declines to review that, and thus the decision of the court of appeals. Article 44.45(b), id. “We need not reach the issue of whether the Court of Appeals’ interpretation ... is correct.” Slip Opinion, p. 4. Once again I dissent.*
And while the Court here deals with “a cracked lens” over a taillight, the approach taken by the majority to justify an arrest is so similar to its treatment of a “left wheel to curb” infraction in Williams v. State, 726 S.W. 99 (Tex.Cr.App.1986), that the reasons I gave for dissenting there are equally applicable to this appalling insistence on doing a policeman’s job and then upholding what it has done in his stead.
To resort to a “chart” in an administrative code and a “rules and regulations manual” said to be on file in courthouses and in vehicle inspection stations to find probable cause and authority to stop an automobile the citizen is lawfully operating otherwise is an incredible demonstration of judicial imposition of that kind of “order” intended in the familiar but often misunderstood phrase “law and order.”
I dissent.

For reasons I will develop on rehearing, the majority errs in its selection of statutes to interpret and in its interpretation of them.