Court Opinion

ID: 9655236
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 19:03:24.417422+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:16.907865
License: Public Domain

PEEPLES, Justice,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. Applying the same rules of law that the majority applies, I conclude that the evidence is sufficient to sustain the conviction.
The majority has concluded that the evidence “failed to eliminate the reasonable hypothesis that appellant was entirely unaware of the presence of the marihuana.” I disagree with that conclusion. I agree that we must apply the principle that a conviction based on circumstantial evidence cannot be sustained unless the circumstances exclude all reasonable hypotheses except the defendant’s guilt. See, e.g., Butler v. State, 769 S.W.2d 234, 238 (Tex.Crim.App.1989); Martin v. State, 753 S.W.2d 384, 386-87 (Tex.Crim.App.1988); Humason v. State, 728 S.W.2d 363, 366 (Tex.Crim.App.1987). But I think that this principle has been carried to absurd lengths in this case.
The key element of this standard of appellate review is reasonableness. “In a circumstantial evidence case, the State need not present evidence excluding every conceivable hypothesis except that of defendant’s guilt, it need only present evidence excluding every reasonable hypothesis.” Hooker v. State, 621 S.W.2d 597, 601 (Tex.Crim.App.1980) (emphasis added) (Onion, P.J., citing six cases); accord, Carlsen v. State, 654 S.W.2d 444, 447 (Tex.Crim.App.1983). The evidence need not exclude all other hypotheses to a moral certainty. See Foster v. State, 779 S.W.2d 845, 863 (Tex.Crim.App.1989); Carlsen v. State, 654 S.W.2d at 447 (citing four cases). “Thus, simply because appellant presented a different version of the events, the evidence is not rendered insufficient.” Little v. State, 758 S.W.2d 551, 562-63 (Tex.Crim.App.), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 934, 109 S.Ct. 328, 102 L.Ed.2d 346 (1988), quoting Anderson v. State, 701 S.W.2d 868 (Tex.Crim.App. 1985), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 870, 107 S.Ct. 239, 93 L.Ed.2d 163 (1986). The State need not negate every hypothesis that the mind of an appellate judge can imagine.
The majority finds the evidence insufficient because it perceives a reasonable hypothesis that appellant was unaware of the 142 pounds of marihuana in the trunk of the car he was driving. I think the evidence justified the jury’s conclusion that appellant knowingly and intentionally possessed the marihuana. Stated differently, the evidence does not support a reasonable hypothesis inconsistent with guilt.
I stress at the outset that appellant was not simply caught driving a car that had drugs in it. It is preposterous to state, as appellant’s brief does, “that the appellant was for a short period of time the sole occupant of a vehicle in which contraband was found....” That assessment of the evidence is accurate only if one views the arrest by itself, in isolation from the events that preceded it. But in this circumstantial evidence case, the jury was entitled to consider all of the circumstances in context. The combined and cumulative force of all the incriminating circumstances may be sufficient to support the jury’s finding. Livingston v. State, 739 S.W.2d 311, 330 (Tex.Crim.App.1987), cert. denied, 487 U.S. 1210, 108 S.Ct. 2858, 101 L.Ed.2d 895 (1988); Beardsley v. State, 738 S.W.2d 681, 685 (Tex.Crim.App.1987).
The record shows that a surveillance team consisting of six state and federal agents, working on the ground and from an airplane, observed two unnamed people (A, a red-haired male, and B, a Hispanic female) drive a silver 1979 Mercury from the Rio Grande Valley to a Dairy Queen several miles outside Pleasanton. The officers from the valley knew that the car was loaded with marihuana. The trip took about four or five hours. Appellant, who *28lives in the Valley, met A at the Dairy Queen and talked with him and two other people (C and D) for 30 or 40 minutes at a table inside. When that meeting broke up, A, C, and D disappeared (apparently B had already left), and appellant filled the car with gasoline and drove away in the Mercury in the same northerly direction on Interstate 37 that it had been traveling all day. Officers stopped him, opened the trunk,1 and found 142 pounds of marihuana worth $227,000. Appellant had no luggage and did not have the key to the trunk. The car’s owner, also from the Valley, testified that he knew appellant and that they lived within three miles of each other, but he offered no other pertinent testimony.
I believe that all these facts, considered together, are sufficient for a jury to conclude rationally that appellant knowingly possessed the marihuana.
What is the reasonable hypothesis consistent with innocence? The majority does not say; it simply announces the bald conclusion that the evidence “failed to eliminate the reasonable hypothesis that appellant was entirely unaware of the presence of the marihuana.” The majority reaches this conclusion without even considering whether the meeting at the Dairy Queen was planned or unplanned.
It is inconceivable that the meeting at the Dairy Queen was coincidental and unplanned.2 The meeting had to have been planned, and the question is, what is the reasonable hypothesis consistent with innocence that requires reversal and acquittal? Are we to believe that the original drivers arranged in advance for appellant to meet them at the highway Dairy Queen and then to take the car to a certain destination without telling him its contents? I concede that such a scenario is conceivable in the sense that almost anything is conceivable. But it is not reasonable, in my opinion, to hypothesize that appellant arranged to meet the couriers at a country truck stop a half day’s drive from his home, talked with them for 30 to 40 minutes, left his car at the Dairy Queen, gassed up the courier’s Mercury, and then drove it in the same direction on the interstate highway — all without knowing what it contained. That hypothesis is utterly absurd. Certainly the jury was entitled to reject it.
For these reasons, I conclude that there is no reasonable alternative hypothesis consistent with innocence. Whether the meeting was planned or unplanned, I cannot agree that the jury acted irrationally in finding appellant guilty.
The majority’s conclusion is not supported by Humason v. State, 728 S.W.2d 363 (Tex.Crim.App.1987). There the police found .03 grams of cocaine in a gym bag on the seat of a truck that the defendant was driving. The Humason court made clear its conclusion that the State had merely proved that the defendant was “present in the vicinity of a controlled substance.” That is a far cry from the 142 pounds involved in this case, along with the lengthy — and in my mind obviously pre-ar-*29ranged — meeting at the Dairy Queen and the other facts already mentioned.
I certainly agree that “it is not enough for the State to show that a defendant was merely present in the vicinity of a controlled substance.” Humason v. State, 728 S.W.2d at 365. In order to show that the defendant knowingly exercised actual care, custody, control or management over the controlled substance, the State must show some kind of “affirmative links” between him and the substance. Id. at 365-66. But the State need not fit the evidence into some affirmative-link pigeonhole. The Humason court stated, “It would be inappropriate for this Court to list examples of circumstances that would provide sufficient evidence of affirmative links in a particular case. Each case presents a unique set of facts that should only be reviewed by the general ‘rational trier of fact’ standard enunciated in Jackson v. Virginia.” Id. at 367 n. 12.
In other words, the facts of each case must be assessed, and they need not fall into any rigid category. In the context of this case, for example, when all the facts are considered, the evidence can be sufficient even though the contraband was not in plain view, there was no odor of marihuana in the car, appellant did not make furtive gestures or try to flee, there were no drugs on his person, and he did not own the car.
I would hold that the facts of this case justified the finding of knowing possession, and that the jury could rationally have found the elements of the offense.

. Acting on information from the officers who had monitored the trip from the Valley, a state highway patrolman had observed the meeting at the Dairy Queen. About ten minutes after the meeting broke up and appellant drove away in the Mercury, he was stopped on the interstate highway. Appellant claimed he did not have a key to the trunk, and the arresting officer forced entry.

. If the meeting was unplanned, we would have to hypothesize something like the following: that (1) A and B drove four or five hours from the Valley with 142 pounds of marihuana; (2) they happened to stop at an isolated country Dairy Queen where, in one incredible coincidence, they chanced upon appellant, who also hailed from the Valley and who knew the car’s owner; (3) caught up in the euphoria of this chance meeting, appellant and A decided to switch cars, and A turned over a car carrying 142 pounds of marihuana, which he had shepherded all day long, to the unwitting appellant, who knew nothing of the precious load in the trunk and apparently was free to take the car wherever he wanted; and (4) appellant filled A’s car with gasoline and continued in the same direction on the interstate highway that the car had been traveling all day, but on a mission other than drug smuggling. That hypothesis would be fanciful instead of reasonable. It would be utterly irrational to hypothesize that drug couriers would turn over a car with 142 pounds of controlled substance to someone they met by happenstance, without having reached an understanding with the recipient about what the car contained and where it would be taken.