Court Opinion

ID: 9766701
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 04:56:53.815688+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:24.774776
License: Public Domain

TEAGUE, Judge,
concurring in result.
In a relatively short period of time, Elí-seo Hernandez Moreno, hereinafter referred to as the appellant, mounted a savage course of criminal conduct from College Station through Hempstead, Houston and Pasadena, with his capture finally occurring in Wharton, during which time he killed six persons, kidnapped six persons, and, using a pistol, robbed another person. The record before us will not permit any reasonable inference that would have justified such conduct. In short, Elíseo Hernandez Moreno is a bad person and is in need of severe punishment for committing the criminal acts that he committed.
One beauty of our criminal justice system, however, is that regardless of how bad or mean a person might be, that person is nevertheless entitled to be given a fair and impartial trial for the offense he is put on trial for committing — in this instance the murder of Department of Public Safety Trooper Russell Lynn Boyd, which murder occurred outside of Hempstead, and after the appellant had fled from College Station where he had recently murdered his brother and sister-in-law, the Garzas.
In his eighth ground of error, the appellant asserts that the evidence that went to the first two persons that he killed, (the Garzas), during his short reign of terror should not have been admitted into evidence. The majority opinion rejects this contention, holding “that the murders of Juan and Esther Garza were admissible to show ‘one continuous episode’ and to show ‘that the case on trial’ was ‘blended or *303closely interwoven’ with the killing of Trooper Boyd ... to show the context in which the offense occurred. The testimony relating to the killings of the Garzas was extremely relevant to placing appellant in possession of the murder weapon one half hour before the death of Trooper Boyd.”
I am unable to agree with either this holding or the reasoning that Judge Campbell, the author of the majority opinion, uses to justify the holding.
The facts relating to this case closely resemble the facts in Wallace v. State, 679 S.W.2d 1 (Tex.Cr.App.1983), in which Judge Campbell, on original submission, wrote a unanimous opinion for this Court reversing the defendant’s conviction after finding and holding in that attempted capital murder of a police officer case that it was reversible error to admit into evidence marihuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine that was discovered in the trunk of the automobile driven by the defendant. The defendant was tried for attempting to kill the police officer who arrested him. In a contextual sense, I believe that the evidence in that cause was as blended or closely interwoven as in this cause, and yet the evidence in that cause was ruled inadmissible but the evidence here is ruled admissible. Perhaps Mr. Webster and I simply do not understand the meaning of the word “context”, which Webster defined as being “the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs.” 283 Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1985 edition).
In this instance, there is absolutely no evidence to show a connection or relationship between the murders of the Garzas and the killing of Trooper Boyd. I pause to point out that the appellant was not on trial for committing the murders of the Garzas, but, instead, was on trial for murdering Trooper Boyd. Had the appellant been on trial for killing the Garzas, then all of the subsequent criminal acts that he committed would have been admissible under the doctrine of flight, and it matters little whether he fled 50 or 500 miles or however long it took to capture him. Hunter v. State, 496 S.W.2d 44, 46 (Tex.Cr.App.1973); Solis v. State, 492 S.W.2d 561 (Tex.Cr.App.1973); Arivette v. State, 513 S.W.2d 857, 862 (Tex.Cr.App.1974). Also see the many, many cases collated under West criminal law keys numbered 369.1, 369.2(1), 369.2(8), 372(1), and 351(3). Had the appellant been on trial for killing the Garzas, flight to escape the immediate consequences of those murders would have been but the unfolding, from alpha to omega, of what thereafter occurred.- But, that is not this case. The appellant was not on trial for killing the Garzas; he was on trial for killing Trooper Boyd. Thus, the doctrine of flight does not become implicated in this cause until after he killed Trooper Boyd. In all due respect to Judge Campbell and those who join his opinion, there is simply no legal justification for admitting into evidence at the guilt stage of the appellant’s trial the murders of the Garzas.
Although I believe that the trial judge . erred when he admitted the testimony going to the murders of the Garzas into evidence, in light of the fact that four other killings and one aggravated robbery were properly admitted into evidence, I am unable to state that there is a reasonable possibility that such contributed either to the finding of guilt or the affirmative findings. Maynard v. State, 685 S.W.2d 60 (Tex.Cr.App.1985). Thus, the error was harmless to the appellant. Furthermore, under Art. 37.071, V.A.C.C.P., this evidence would have been admissible at the punishment stage of the trial.
I agree with the majority opinion’s holding that the trial judge did not err in overruling the appellant’s motion to quash. However, I would base this decision on this Court’s two recent decisions of Adams v. State, 707 S.W.2d 900 (Tex.Cr.App.1986), and Opdahl v. State, 705 S.W.2d 697 (Tex.Cr.App.1986), which cases should make it absolutely clear to anyone that at the present time a defendant who challenges a trial judge’s decision to overrule a motion to quash an indictment or information is attempting to achieve the impossible.
I also take issue with the majority opinion’s holding that the facts adduced at the *304guilt stage of the trial are sufficient to support the jury’s affirmative finding to the probability question. See Art. 37.071, Y.A.C.C.P. In particular, I am compelled to continue to protest to this Court’s giving its court-created legal conclusion, that the facts of the offense itself are sufficient to sustain an affirmative finding to the probability question, continuing viability.
“The penalty of death differs from all other forms of criminal punishment, not in degree but in kind. It is unique in its total irrevocability. It is unique in its rejection of rehabilitation of the convict as a basic purpose of criminal justice. And it is unique, finally, in its absolute renunciation of all that is embodied in our concept of humanity.” Stewart, J., concurring opinion, Furman v. Georgia, 92 S.Ct., at 2760. These are many of the reasons why our Legislature enacted our capital murder law as it did.
The issue that is before us today, however, is not whether death is cruel and unusual punishment, because at the present time both this Court and the Supreme Court, as presently constituted, have determined that it is not. The issue that is before us, however, concerns what meaning we must give to the provisions of Art. 37.071, V.A.C.C.P.
I find that by holding that an affirmative finding can be supported only by the facts of the case, as the majority does in this cause, is an attempt to act Legislatively. Furthermore, if that is a good rule of law, then, pray tell, why did the Supreme Court of the United States in Branch v. Texas, sub nom, Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 92 S.Ct. 2726, 33 L.Ed.2d 346 (1972), hold that the then Texas statute on capital murder violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution because a Texas jury was given untrammeled discretion to let an accused live or insist that he die? Why did our Legislature go to the time, expense, and trouble to thereafter put into our capital murder statute restrictions on the jury’s decision to cause the death penalty to be imposed? To continue to adhere to the above rule of law that this Court itself created in O’Bryan v. State, 591 S.W.2d 464 (Tex.Cr.App.1979), is, I believe, a plea to the Legislature to abolish the provisions of Art. 37.071, V.A. C.C.P. And, who knows, the present aggressive and assertive majority of the Supreme Court of the United States just might expressly overrule Furman v. Georgia, supra.
Notwithstanding what I have stated, but in light of the fact that the infliction of death on a convicted criminal is not now cruel and unusual punishment, I am constrained to find, after excluding the inadmissible evidence, that there is sufficient evidence to sustain the jury’s affirmative finding that there is a probability that the appellant will in the future commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society.
The appellant blames what happened on the fact that he was then “suffering the combined effects of chronic alcoholism and severe emotional distress over an involuntary separation from his spouse.” He also presented evidence that he would not be a continuing threat to society if he was denied access to alcoholic beverages. However, it is a well known fact that inmates in the Department of Corrections have access to, among other things, alcohol, albeit it may be the home grown variety.
I, for one, am unable to believe that an involuntary separation from one’s spouse is sufficient reason or cause that would warrant that person killing six persons at three separate locations in a cold, calculating and brutal manner, with that person each time firing multiple shots at his victims at obviously close range. The evidence additionally established that the appellant threatened the lives of numerous other persons. Throw in the murders of the Garzas and this gave the State a powerful argument why the jury should reach the decision that would cause the trial judge to impose the death penalty. Had appellant managed to evade the roadblock set up in Wharton, in light of the human destruction that he had earlier and quickly committed, I believe that there is at least a reasonable probabili*305ty that he would have caused much more human destruction and misery.
Elíseo Hernandez Moreno has demonstrated to me that he can be a mean and vicious member of the human race. Based upon the record that is before us, and the present state of the law, it is my judgment that Moreno must die by lethal injection.
The majority opinion reaches the right result, albeit in overruling several of the appellant’s grounds of error it does so for the wrong reasons.