Court Opinion

ID: 9763868
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 02:59:15.50984+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:50.543557
License: Public Domain

ON APPELLANT’S motion for rehearing
*17DICE, Judge.
In his motion for rehearing, appellant insists that the court erred, during the selection of the jury in the case, in ordering additional talesmen summoned by the sheriff from which the jury was completed instead of drawing the names of the jurors from the jury wheel. Appellant relies upon Coy v. State, 163 Tex. Cr. R. 58, 288 S. W. 2d 782, in which it was held that in the formation of the jury in a capital case in Bexar County, a county under the jury wheel law, it was error, upon the list of jurors being exhausted, to complete the jury from talesmen summoned by the sheriff under Art. 596 V.A.C.C.P. and that the jury should have been completed from the names of jurors drawn from the jury wheel.
The Coy case was decided by this court in 1956 prior to the amendment of Art. 601-A, V.A.C.C.P. by the 55th Legislature in 1957. Acts 1957. 55th Leg. p. 792, Ch. 327.
As presently amended, Art. 601-A, supra, provides that in all counties in this state where jurors are drawn from a jury wheel and where as many as one hundred (100) jurors have been summoned in such county for regular service for the week in which a capital case is set for trial the judge of the court having jurisdiction of the capital case in which a motion for special venire has been made, “shall grant or refuse such motion for a special venire and upon such refusal require the case to be tried by regular jurors summoned for service in such county for regular service for the week in which such Capital case is set for trial and such additional talesmen as may he summoned by the Sheriff upon order of the court as provided, in Art. 596 of the Code of Criminal Procedure,” etc.
In Johnson v. State, 167 Tex. Cr. R. 289, 319 S. W. 2d 720 the constitutionality of Art. 601-A, supra, as amended was upheld by this court.
Appellant’s trial was after the effective date of the 1957 amendment of Art. 601-A, supra, and was in a county in which the jury wheel law is applicable. Art. 2904, V.A.C.S. As amended, Art. 601-A, supra, clearly authorizes a trial judge in such a county to order additional talesmen summoned by the sheriff in a capital case as provided by Art. 596, supra. Under the provisions of Art. 596, supra, the trial court is authorized to order the sheriff to summon additional talesmen upon a *18failure to select a jury from those summoned upon the special venire.
The court’s order in the present case directing the sheriff to summon the additional jurors recites that there had been a failure to select a jury from those persons who had been summoned. Under the record the court’s action was authorized and no error is shown.
The motion is overruled.