Court Opinion

ID: 9643339
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 20:26:19.667331+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:59.586081
License: Public Domain

WOODLEY, Judge
(dissenting).
Aleñe Joseph, called as a witness for the state, testified to affirmative facts injurious to the state. She testified that appellant did not bring her a package and that she had never seen the bottle the officers said they found in her house. The state pleaded surprise and was properly permitted to impeach her.
The questions and answers set out in the majority opinion are erroneously construed as “an affirmative showing that the written statement contained such matter,” and constituted impeachment, though the witness denied:
(1) that she told the police officer that appellant gave her a package;,
(2) told her to give it to Mrs. Trahan;
(3) that she was shown a package which was the package that appellant told her to give to Mrs. Trahan;
(4) that she put the package appellant gave her in a dresser drawer;
(5) that she told Mrs. Trahan she had a package that appellant told her to give her, and
(6) denied that' she made the statement: “I had not had time to give Mrs. Trahan the package yet when the police came into my house. The police found the package where I had put it in the dresser drawer.”
Predicate was thus laid for the impeachment of the witness by proof that she in fact had matíe the statement she had denied making to Officer Phillips, but neither the witness sought to be impeached nor any other witness testified that she made any of the statements, and no statement in writing was introduced.
As I see it, the majority opinion confuses the question of error in the state’s attempted impeachment of its own witness who has merely failed to give the testimony expected, and the attempted impeachment of such a witness who, contrary to his previous statement and to the surprise of the state, testifies to facts injurious to the state.
The majority errs in holding that the trial court should have instructed the jury as though the witness had been impeached. Certainly an instruction such as quoted from Carroll v. State would not be proper.
Suppose the court had instructed the jury that certain evidence had been admitted for the purpose of impeaching the witness Aleñe Joseph. To whose testimony and to what evidence would the court have directed the jury’s attention? To hers? And how could the jury have found that the questions answered by her in the negative impeached Aleñe Joseph? What “impeachment testi*883mony” could the jury properly have been instructed not to consider as evidence of the guilt of the defendant? Her testimony?
ON STATE’S SECOND MOTION FOR REHEARING
Rehearing denied.