Court Opinion

ID: 9681967
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 08:02:24.130116+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:36.785770
License: Public Domain

JONES, Justice,
dissenting.
I agree with the majority’s conclusion that the admission of the child’s “outcry statement” through the testimony of DHS-worker Kimberly Harmon was error. However, I am unable to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that the error made no contribution to the conviction or punishment. Accordingly, I dissent from the af-firmance of the conviction.
With respect to trial-court error in a criminal case, Rule 81(b)(2) of the Rules of Appellate Procedure effectively creates a “presumption of harm”:
If the appellate record in a criminal case reveals error in the proceedings below, the appellate court shall reverse the judgment under review, unless the appellate court determines beyond a reasonable doubt that the error made no contribution to the conviction or to the punishment.
Tex.R.App.P. 81(b)(2) (emphasis added).
The United States Supreme Court has recognized that the discrimination required by a harmless error analysis “is one of judgment transcending confinement by formula or precise rule.” Kotteakos v. United States, 328 U.S. 750, 761, 66 S.Ct. 1239, 1246, 90 L.Ed. 1557 (1946). Nonetheless, the Court of Criminal Appeals has provided appellate courts with general guidelines to follow in applying Rule 81(b)(2):
In summary, the reviewing court should focus not on the weight of the other evidence of guilt, but rather on whether the error at issue might possibly have prejudiced the jurors’ decision-making; it should ask not whether the jury reached the correct result, but rather whether the jurors were able properly to apply law to facts in order to reach a verdict. Consequently, the reviewing court must focus upon the process and not on the result. In other words, a reviewing court must always examine whether the trial was an essentially fair one. If the error was of a magnitude that it disrupted the jurors’ orderly evaluation of the evidence, no matter how overwhelming it might have been, then the conviction is tainted.
Harris v. State, 790 S.W.2d 568, 587-88 (Tex.Crim.App.1989).
The error here was in the admission of the testimony of Kimberly Harmon, a DHS worker to whom the child first made outcry. Harmon’s testimony itself was riveting, as she described how the child used anatomically correct dolls to reenact the events:
A: (by Harmon): Then I took the pants off of the girl [doll] and asked her if anybody had touched her here and she said, “Yes.”
And I said, “Who,” and it was the same response, “Daddy.”
“And who is Daddy?” “Ruben.” And “Show me.” And she had taken the index finger of the doll and put it inside the vagina. And I remember asking her, “Are you putting it inside or outside,” and all she kept doing was *440taking it in and out, in and out, in and out.
Q: Do you recall Rosemary’s expression or demeanor?
A: She was real intense. She kept doing it in and out, in and out. She never said anything, but she just kept doing it in and out.
Even from the “cold” black-and-white record before this Court, one can almost feel the child reliving a traumatic experience.
The majority characterizes Harmon’s testimony as “only a small component of the State’s case-in-chief,” but in fact it was one of only three “pieces” of evidence the State used to prove appellant’s commission of the offense. Moreover, an outcry statement is particularly inculpatory because it comes from the victim herself. Far from being an unimportant piece of evidence, Harmon’s testimony regarding the child’s outcry statement filled what might otherwise have been regarded by some jurors as a hole in the State’s case.
In addition, although the State may have considered the testimony of John Sanchez its strongest evidence, the prosecutor did not ignore Harmon’s testimony in her closing argument:
Now, keep in mind also what you heard from Kim Harmon. Consider her testimony. She’s the DHS worker who had contact with little Rosemary, two and a half at this time, at the DHS shelter, and she did a videotape.
And what did that little girl tell her? She took those dolls and showed her what Ruben Garza had done to her. She said, through her actions with the doll, that he had penetrated her vaginal area, her female sexual organ, in through the female sexual organ with the finger, with the index finger is what she showed Kim.
Where does a two and a half-year old child learn that, ladies and gentlemen?
In my opinion, Harmon’s testimony, in combination with the prosecutor’s argument, “might possibly have prejudiced the jurors’ decision-making.” Harris, 790 S.W.2d at 587-88.
This conclusion is confirmed by applying a slightly different formulation, also from Harris, of the Court of Criminal Appeals’ harm-analysis guidelines:
A procedure for reaching this determination [of harmfulness] should: first, isolate the error and all its effects, using the considerations set out above and any other considerations suggested by the facts of an individual case; and second, ask whether a rational trier of fact might have reached a different result if the error and its effects had not resulted.
Harris, 790 S.W.2d at 588 (emphasis added).1 Using this formulation of the procedure, there is no doubt in my mind that the error in the present ease calls for reversal: a rational trier of facts clearly might have reached a different result if the error and its effects had not resulted. Without the outcry statement, the prosecution would have been left primarily with the testimony of John Sanchez. His testimony was strong, but we are not able to discern from the record how credible he appeared to the jurors. Certainly, we cannot say that a rational trier of facts would have been required to accept Sanchez’s testimony at face value.
The true difficulty in this case, it seems to me, stems from the inescapable feeling that the jury reached the correct result. Yet the Court of Criminal Appeals has expressly admonished us not to consider that factor: “[The reviewing court] should ask not whether the jury reached the correct result_ [T]he reviewing court must focus upon the process and not on the result.” Harris, 790 S.W.2d at 588.
We must focus on the process, not the result. In the present case, the process was flawed, and following the guidelines of Harris and subsequent cases I am not able to determine beyond a reasonable doubt that the error made no contribution to the conviction or punishment. I would reverse *441the conviction and remand the cause for a new trial.

. I recognize that the continued viability of such an "outcome determinative” analysis may be in doubt. See Shelby v. State, 819 S.W.2d 544 (Tex.Crim.App.1991).