Court Opinion

ID: 9771399
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 16:42:09.606955+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:40:59.047362
License: Public Domain

CLINTON, Judge,
concurring on appellant’s petition for discretionary review.
This is another in a plethora of causes measuring sufficiency of evidence against *181the charge given the jury under the aegis of Benson v. State, 661 S.W.2d 708 (Tex.Cr.App.1982-1983) (opinions on rehearing), and its progeny.
Referring to “our most recent decisions in Jones v. State, 815 S.W.2d 667 (Tex.Cr.App.1991) and Walker v. State, 823 S.W.2d 247 (Tex.Cr.App.1991),” the Court pointedly notices that “[t]he State has not presented any argument not previously considered by this Court.” Majority Opinion, at 180.* Accordingly, the Court confirms the relevant operative rules extant in this jurisdiction, viz:
“... Although the abstract portion of the jury charge defined the law of parties, the law of parties was not incorporated within the application paragraph which authorized the jury verdict. Therefore, the evidence is insufficient to support the only verdict of guilty which the jury was authorized to return.”
Ibid. See also Walker v. State, supra (Clinton, J., concurring).
With those observations offered in aid of finally settling these issues, I join the opinion and judgment of the Court.

What it means is that this time the affected district attorney seeks to compensate for the fact that he "originally failed to recognize on direct appeal ... the absence of the parties theory of liability in the application portion of the charge,” and therefore addresses the issue in light of the State’s view of Benson and its followings, including Garrett v. State, 749 S.W.2d 784, 801 (Tex.Cr.App.1986-1988) (Opinion on Rehearing), and Nickerson v. State, 782 S.W.2d 887 (Tex.Cr.App.1990). State’s Brief on the Merits, at 8, 9-15. (All emphasis here and throughout this opinion is mine unless otherwise indicated.)
The point is underscored by the fact that on October 23, 1991, the Court denied State’s motion for rehearing in Walker v. State, supra, in which the sole ground challenges an order of acquittal under our state standard for testing evidentiary sufficiency, viz:
‘This Court has failed to consider recent federal case law which demonstrates that this Court’s Garrett-Jones1 doctrine — the doctrine that judges the sufficiency of the evidence by focusing upon the application paragraph of the charge in isolation — is ‘a state procedural nuance foreign to federal constitutional norms.’2 The Court’s attempted application of the federal doctrine enunciated in Jackson v. Virginia, Burks, and Greene3 has been expressly repudiated by the federal courts as a matter of federal law. Since it is now clear that the Garrett-Jones doctrine is purely a creation of Texas law, this Court should apply the previous Texas decisions which require the cause to be remanded for a new trial."
Motion, at 1-2 [citations in footnotes omitted].