Court Opinion

ID: 9760746
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 01:11:46.565072+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:16.666848
License: Public Domain

MEYERS, Judge,
dissenting on Appellant’s Petition for Discretionary Review.
I believe that Studer v. State, 799 S.W.2d 263 (Tex.Crim.App.1990) was wrongly decided, mainly for the reasons given by the majority in this case. Accordingly, I do not disagree, at least in the abstract, with most of what the majority opinion has to say. Where I part company with my colleagues on this issue is at the point where they revise the essential holding of Studer to support a distinction which is at odds both with logic and with the law.
The Texas Constitution defines “indictment” as “a written instrument presented to a court by a grand jury charging a person with the commission of an offense”1 and it *484provides that “presentation of an indictment ... to a court invests the court with jurisdiction of the cause.” Tex. Const, art. 5, § 12. In Studer we held that a written instrument presented to a court by a grand jury which does not charge “an offense” is, nevertheless, an indictment and, therefore, invests the court with jurisdiction. Today, a majority of the Court holds that a written instrument presented to a court by a grand jury which does not charge “a person” is not an indictment and does not, therefore, invest the court with jurisdiction. The basis for this remarkable distinction is not made clear by the majority opinion, and because the requirement that an indictment charge “an offense” is given by the same constitutional provision requiring it to charge “a person,” I cannot subscribe to the view that one requirement is forfeitable while the other is not.
The Court’s mistake, I think, derives from a fundamental misunderstanding of our opinion in Studer. The majority seems to think that, under the Studer rationale, an indictment may be sufficient to charge an offense even though it fails to allege all essential elements of that offense so long as one can tell from examining it what offense the State intended to charge. See Fisher v. State, 887 S.W.2d 49 (Tex.Crim.App.1994); Thomason v. State, 892 S.W.2d 8 (Tex.Crim.App.1994). But that was not Studer ⅛ rationale at all. What this Court actually held in Studer, and in its companion case of Rodriguez v. State, 799 S.W.2d 301 (Tex.Crim.App.1990), was that any written instrument returned by a grand jury is an indictment for purposes of investing a court with jurisdiction, whether it charges “an offense” or not. A brief restatement of the argument given in Studer makes this perfectly clear.
We began our analysis with the proposition that failure of an indictment or information to allege all constituent elements of an offense is a defect of substance and that “[t]he amendments to Art. 1.14, Y.A.C.C.P., and Art. V, § 12 did not, on their face, change this long-standing precedent.” 799 S.W.2d at 268. We conceded that there are only four defects of substance known to Texas criminal law: failure to charge an offense2, failure to allege a date within the statutory period of limitation, allegation of a defense, and apparent lack of jurisdiction. Tex.Code Crim. Proc. art. 27.08; 799 S.W.2d at 267. We concluded that a written instrument which does not allege every constituent element of a statutory crime is substantively defective because it does not charge an offense.3
Having thus decided that the purported indictment in Studer did not charge an offense, we next proceeded to inquire whether the failure of a written instrument to charge an offense means that it is not an indictment within the meaning of the Texas Constitution, article V, section 12. Reasoning that the Code of Criminal Procedure, article 1.14(b), requires all defects of substance in an indictment, including its failure to charge an offense, to be raised prior to trial, we *485inferred that the Legislature did not mean to imply a written instrument is not really an “indictment” unless it charges the commission of an offense.
The change in Art. 1.14(b) requires, among other things, that substance exceptions be raised pre-trial or otherwise the accused has forfeited his right to raise the objection on appeal or by collateral attack. If omitting an element from an indictment is still a defect of substance in an indictment, it naturally follows that the indictment is still an indictment despite the omission of that element.
799 S.W.2d at 268.
It is thus apparent that Studer was making exactly the same argument Cook makes in the instant cause. He argued that defects in an indictment must be raised before trial only if the defective instrument is actually an indictment under the constitutional definition. He maintained that a written instrument which does not charge an offense is not an indictment, just as Cook now maintains that a written instrument which does not charge a person is not an indictment. This argument, however, was plainly and unambiguously rejected in Studer. That the Court now accepts it in the instant cause represents a significant revision of our Stu-der position which, in fairness to bench and bar alike, we ought to acknowledge.
Mind you, I am not irrevocably opposed to such a revision. Indeed, I am sympathetic with the view, expressed in the majority opinion here, that an indictment does not “invest a court with jurisdiction,” as the Constitution puts it, unless it “eharg[es] a person with the commission of an offense.” This is not because I think that a written instrument should be made a necessary prerequisite to the exercise of a trial court’s jurisdiction, any more than I think it should not. In my opinion, the lawmakers of this State may choose to predicate the exercise of trial-level criminal jurisdiction upon the existence of a written instrument if they see fit to do so. But, should they instead decide to dispense with the requirement of a charging instrument altogether, I would not be inclined to think it unconstitutional. After all, the grand jury screening to which defendants are constitutionally entitled in felony cases can be accomplished without memorializing the process in a formal document, and the notice to which defendants are constitutionally entitled in all criminal cases can be provided from a different source. Tex. Const, art. I, § 9.
Nevertheless, it is apparent that the people of Texas have not in fact opted to dispense with formal charging instruments in criminal cases. Indeed, they have deliberately chosen to require an indictment or information before “invest[ing] [a] court with jurisdiction” of a criminal case.4 And, lest there be any doubt about what specifically is necessary for the exercise of such jurisdiction, they have gone on expressly to say that “a written instrument presented to a court by a grand jury charging a person with the commission of an offense” is required. This seems pretty clear to me.
*486But Studer would not have it to be so, and I will not disgrace the jurisprudence of this Court or insult the intelligence of trial judges and lawyers by pretending that Studer is consistent with the majority view in this case when it obviously is not. The Studer Court realized that its interpretation of the questioned constitutional language was not literal. In fact, it consciously decided not to construe such language according to its plain meaning because it realized that doing so would effectively undermine the purpose of those legislators who enacted the Code amendments and those citizens who approved the constitutional amendments in question. In fact, nearly half of our opinion in Studer is actually devoted to investigating and articulating extratextual sources of legislative intent in order to demonstrate why the constitutional definition of “indictment” should not be read as it is written. The author of Studer even cited it in a later dissenting opinion as one of two contemporary, leading authorities for the proposition that “ambiguity in a statute is not apparent until the legislative history is researched and the true legislative intent is discerned.” Boykin v. State, 818 S.W.2d 782, 789 (Tex.Crim.App.1991) (Miller, J., dissenting).
Thus, although I believe Studer was wrongly decided, it was by no means an accident, nor was its rationale expressed by the Court without due consideration. Fully five years passed between enactment of the statutory and constitutional amendments and our construction of them in Studer. During that time, the issues were vigorously debated in the courts of appeals and eventually in this Court. Everyone knew what the arguments were on both sides. And, in the end, the Court’s opinion was virtually unanimous. Only a single judge expressed significant disagreement with the majority rationale. See Studer, 799 S.W.2d at 286 (Clinton, J., concurring); Rodriguez, 799 S.W.2d at 303 (Clinton, J., dissenting).
Now, only five years later, most of the Studer Court is gone. And so, apparently is Studer itself. What began as a grass roots movement for the reform of charging instrument law, focused almost exclusively on the elimination of jurisdictional defects from indictments and informations, has now become a caricature of itself. It is just the sort of thing that introduces unnecessary complexity into the case law, confuses practitioners, and diminishes this Court in the estimation of judges and scholars. If it were the pleasure of this Court to reexamine the holding in Studer, I would most likely approve the effort. If, after reconsideration, it were the opinion of the Court to overrule or substantially qualify Studer, I might even be willing to join the opinion, so long as it had the overwhelming support of my colleagues, definitively settled the issue, and was justified by more than a mere acknowledgement of error. But the Court has done none of these things in the instant cause, and seems disinclined to do them in future. Instead, it merely reverses course, quietly reinstating the law of jurisdictional pleading defects and pretending all the while that Studer is still alive and well. But, of course, it isn’t.
The rule of stare decisis obliges appellate judges to respect the precedents of their own court, whether they agree with those precedents or not. That does not mean, of course, that bad cases should never be overruled. It only means that cases should not be overruled without a compelling reason. It also means that cases should not be distinguished on patently fictitious grounds. The underlying rationale of Studer, however mistaken it may have been as a matter of constitutional interpretation, is nevertheless a more coherent and workable approach to charging instrument law than the one with which, inspired by Fisher and Thomason, the Court leaves us in this case. Because I cannot agree that there are compelling reasons to make a bigger mess of the law than Studer already has, I respectfully dissent.

. The Code of Criminal Procedure describes it somewhat differently as "the written statement of a grand jury accusing a person therein named of some act or omission which, by law, is declared to be an offense.” Tex.Code Crim.Proc. art. 21.01.

. Article 27.08, Subdivision 1 says that an indictment or information is substantively defective if "it does not appear therefrom that an offense against the law was committed by the defendant.” This Court has always understood the statute to mean that an indictment is substantively defective if it does not charge an offense. The cases which illustrate this fact are legion. For present purposes, however, it is sufficient to quote from only one of the most famous and influential.
Only if the defect be of such a degree as to charge no offense against the law, and thereby be void, will the exception to the substance be considered for the first time on appeal trader Article 27.08(1), supra.
American Plant Food Corp. v. State, 508 S.W.2d 598, 604 (Tex.Cr.App.1974). Any suggestion, therefore, that an indictment may be sufficient to charge an offense within the meaning of the Constitution, yet "appear” not to charge an offense within the meaning of article 27.08(1), would represent an interpretation of the latter so radically different from any thus far contemplated by our precedents as to be entirely novel. For present purposes, however, it is enough to know that our opinion in Studer expressly eschewed any departure from existing case law on the subject.

. Clearly, omission of a constituent element does not suggest that the prosecution is limitations barred, that the alleged conduct was excused or justified, or that the subject matter of the prosecution is otherwise beyond the trial court's jurisdiction. Accordingly, if omission of a constituent element is indeed a defect of substance, it must be because a failure to plead all offensive elements is tantamount to a failure to charge an offense.

. Ironically, the majority seems to concede that, under our prior law, as interpreted in King v. State, 473 S.W.2d 43 (Tex.Crim.App.1971), indictments were not really jurisdictional, since they could be waived. Op. at 475 n. 1. Jurisdictional defects, of course, are not waivable. But the majority then goes on to describe "the constitutional requirement of an indictment” as a “fundamental systemic requirement" under our holding in Marin v. State, 851 S.W.2d 275 (Tex.Crim.App.1993) because it is "so important that it is mandatory absent an express waiver.” This is wrong, of course. Under Marin, fundamental systemic requirements are not waivable at all. Perhaps it is the majority's view that the constitutional requirement that an indictment name "a person,” while not jurisdictional, is nevertheless cognizable on direct appeal even absent a trial objection because it is a waivable right of the defendant. If so, the majority opinion is especially interesting, since the Constitution does not seem to make the indictment itself a right of the defendant. The truth is that, prior to the amendment of article 5, section 12 in 1985, the Texas Constitution did not provide that any specific written instrument was necessary to "invest the court with jurisdiction of the cause." It was only our case law that did that — the very case law sought to be eliminated by the amendments of 1985, and which were eliminated in fact by our holding in Studer. Accordingly, the majority’s position would be better supported by a claim that the constitutional amendment effectively overruled King. But then, of course, the Code of Criminal Procedure articles providing for the waiver of an indictment would be unconstitutional.