Court Opinion

ID: 9656632
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 19:53:04.522458+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:33.833365
License: Public Domain

LEE ANN DAUPHINOT, Justice
concurring.
I respectfully disagree with the majority’s analysis but concur in the result. The majority relies on rule 202 of the Texas Rules of Evidence that both requires us to take judicial notice of Mississippi law and grants us the discretion to take judicial notice.1
The trial court was not presented with Mississippi law when asked to rule on Appellant’s motion to quash. By requiring this court to take judicial notice of Mississippi law in ruling on whether the trial court erred in denying the motion, the rules of evidence appear to require this court to retry the motion with the aid of information not afforded to the trial court. This scheme can only lead to the inadvertent sandbagging of the trial judge. How could this court ever justly hold that a trial court erred by failing to consider law never presented to that court? We should be required to look only to the information available to the trial court in determining error.
When foreign law is not presented to the trial court for judicial notice, the foreign law is presumed to be the same as Texas law.2 The case before us is a felony DWI.3 As the majority points out, Appellant’s pri- or conviction is an element of the offense.4 Had Appellant not pled guilty, would we be obligated to determine a sufficiency challenge based on the evidence before the *892trier of fact or the evidence as supplemented at the appellate level? Surely due process requires us to examine the record as it existed at the time of trial whether we are ruling on a sufficiency issue or a question of abuse of discretion. To the extent that rule 202 does not permit us to do so, I respectfully submit that rule 202 should be reexamined.

. Tex.R. Evid. 202.

. Langston v. State, 776 S.W.2d 586, 587 (Tex.Crim.App.1989).

. See Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 49.09(b) (Vernon 2003).

. See id.