Court Opinion

ID: 9644777
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 21:04:45.061018+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:11:18.233826
License: Public Domain

CLINTON, Judge,
dissenting.
Today the majority presents yet another “Son of Studer.”
Studer v. State, 799 S.W.2d 263 (Tex.Cr.App.1990), stands for the proposition that although an “information” which fails to allege necessary .matters the Legislature has duly prescribed is facially “substantively defective,” nonetheless “[o]nce presented to the trial court ‘by an attorney for the State’ the trial court obtained jurisdiction of the cause” solely because the accused “failed to make any pre-trial objection to the substance error in the information.” Id., at 273. In other words, a trial judge may hail to court, try, convict and punish a citizen on an invalid information unless at least a day before trial the citizen protests that the prosecution is about to violate the law.
Today, however, it is not that the information is facially defective in any respect. The more fundamental problem is that the *321underlying complaint — the sine qua non of a valid information, with good reason— is fatally defective.* Therefore, while proper on its face, the information is actually null and void for want of a valid predicate complaint. Shackelford v. State, 516 S.W.2d 180 (Tex.Cr.App.1974); Articles 15.-04, 15.05 and 21.22, V.A.C.C.P. Thus without a proper complaint made by a credible person the assistant county attorney who signed and presented the information is in a very real sense both the accuser and the prosecutor.
For those reasons, as well as on the strength of the analysis made by the court of appeals, Aguilar v. State, 810 S.W.2d 230, at 231-232 (Tex.App.-El Paso 1991), I dissent to stretching and extending the Studer construction to excuse prosecutorial blunders and the consequential violations both of first principles in our jurisprudence and of due process and due course of law guaranteed by our Federal and State Constitutions.

 The good reason is that a complaint must be made and sworn to by "some credible person" other than the prosecutor, Article 21.22, V.A.C.C.P., in order to prevent the vice of same person being both accuser and prosecutor in a misdemeanor case. Wells v. State, 516 S.W.2d 663, at 664 (Tex.Cr.App.1974); Kennedy v. State, 161 Tex.Cr.R. 303, 276 S.W.2d 291, at 294 (1955); Flournoy v. State, 51 Tex.Cr.R. 29, 100 S.W. 151 (1907). The late Presiding Judge Morrison explained the sound policy considerations behind the rule, viz:
"... Our law consists of numerous interlacing checks and balances which must always be maintained in order to preserve our constitutional form of government. If one assistant district attorney signs a complaint, another signs the information, and a third directs the prosecution, then the accused has actually been placed on trial by the act of one man, their principal, the district attorney.
"... To hold that one individual might be the accuser and the prosecutor in misdemeanor cases would certainly be contrary to the policy of our law to protect its citizens from the inherent dangers arising from the concentration of power in any one individual.
"It is apparent that our procedure, which authorizes prosecutions by information presented by the prosecuting attorney, is bottomed on the proposition that there must be a supporting affidavit, without which an information cannot be lawfully presented. In other words, a prosecuting attorney is not authorized to institute prosecutions in the county court upon his independent act or of his own volition. Federal procedure is in keeping with that rule, as also was the rule at common law.”
Id., 276 S.W.2d at 294.