Court Opinion

ID: 9666691
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 01:25:32.393379+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:32.255943
License: Public Domain

GAMMAGE, Justice,
dissenting.
I join in the granting of the State’s motion to reconsider, but would affirm the trial court’s judgment of conviction.
The majority errs when it concludes that it is the “incriminating nature of [the] fact, and not just the appellant’s knowledge of [the] fact, that render[s] the oral statement admissible.” The Court of Criminal Appeals clearly observed in Briddle v. State, No. 68,990, Tex.Cr.App., September 23, 1987 (not yet reported), that it was guilty knowledge of corroborated “facts asserted by the appellant [which] conduced to establish his guilt.” It was the corroboration and not the independently incriminating nature of the facts which made his statement admissible in that case.
I would hold that David Port’s assertion that “I know I hit her at least two times, maybe on the head,” and his statement regarding the gun, that it was “the one I used to kill her,” are admissible exceptions to the general prohibition on oral confessions under Tex.Code Cr.P.Ann. art. 38.22 § 3(c) (Supp.1987).
At the time Port made these statements the whereabouts of Debra Schatz was unknown to the police. Only the killer could have known whether she was dead, how she died, or where and how many times she had been shot. Only the killer could have known what instrument of death had been used to take the victim’s life. When Port made these statements, the police could only suspect they were true. When the body of Debra Schatz was later found and a medical examination disclosed she died from two gunshot wounds to her head, and a ballistics test established that the gun identified by Port was the instrument of the crime, these discoveries “support[ed] the truth of the facts asserted by [Port] and conduce[d] to establish his guilt, and established] the reliability of the confession which is the concern of the statute involved.” Briddle, supra, (emphasis added). It is “the statements which conduce to *792establish guilt, and which are found to be true,” which are the focus of the exception under § 3(c). Valtiero v. State, 219 S.W.2d 73, 79 (Tex.Cr.App.1949).
Nowhere does the statutory language require that the “facts or circumstances that are found to be true and which conduce to establish the guilt of the accused,” do so independent of the accused’s statement. Indeed, it is the corroboration of the accused’s own statement which damns him. The machete found under the automobile seat in Briddle had no significance to the police absent Briddle’s statement that it had been used in the commission of the crime and then placed in the automobile. Its significance — and the only way in which it could “conduce to establish the guilt of the accused” — was in connection with Brid-dle’s “statement which contain[ed] assertions of facts or circumstances that [were] found to be true.”
Only when the fact or circumstance corroborated the accused’s disclosure of guilty knowledge did the fact or circumstance conduce to establish the accused’s guilt. David Port made assertions of facts and circumstances which were not within the knowledge of the police and which only the killer of Debra Schatz could have known at the time. When these facts and circumstances were found to be true they conduced to establish Port’s guilt and his assertions became admissible under § 3(c).
The trial court’s judgment of conviction should be affirmed; I dissent from its reversal and that part of the majority’s order of modification confirming its reversal.