Court Opinion

ID: 9660312
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 22:10:08.605721+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:17.715644
License: Public Domain

ROBERTS, Judge,
concurring.
A plea of guilty before a jury is as close to a sure thing as one can come in our adversary system. It is almost impossible to commit reversible error in such a proceeding, but this case demonstrates that nothing is impossible if it is sought zealously enough. This case also reminds us that zeal must be limited by law. “A Lawyer Should Represent a Client Zealously Within the Bounds of the Law.” Rules Governing the State Bar of Texas, Article 12, Section 8 [usually known as the Code of Professional Responsibility], Canon 7 (emphasis supplied).
“In order to bring about just and informed decisions, evidentiary and procedural rules have been established by tribunals to permit the inclusion of relevant evidence and argument and the exclusion of all other considerations. * * *
“Rules of evidence and procedure are designed to lead to just decisions and are part of the framework of the law. Thus while a lawyer may take steps in good faith and within the framework of the law to test the validity of rules, he is not justified in consciously violating such rules and he should be diligent in his efforts to guard against his unintentional violation of them. As examples, ... a lawyer should not by subterfuge put before a jury matters which it cannot properly consider.”
Id., EC 7-24 & 7-25.
I join Judge W. C. Davis’s opinion. The State pursued a course of conduct that denied the appellant a fair trial. I write separately to emphasize one aspect of the misconduct that in itself would warrant a mistrial: the calling of an incompetent reputation witness as a means of evading the law of evidence on unadjudicated offenses.
It must be remembered that the only reason for calling a reputation witness is to give the jury knowledge of someone’s moral character, which knowledge has been gained by the members of the community in which he lives and acts. See J. Wigmore, 5 Evidence, Sections 1610 & 1615 (J. Chadbourn rev. 1974). This appellant’s community was in Dallas; he lived there and had been reared there. Yet the prosecuting attorneys called a reputation witness who *807never had worked in Dallas and who never had talked about the appellant to anyone other than themselves.1 How did they come to look so far afield from the appellant’s community? Only one answer is possible: they called Officer Gonzales because he had once “stopped” the appellant. That is, they were not looking in good faith for witnesses who knew the appellant’s reputation; they were looking for witnesses who knew about unadjudicated offenses the appellant had committed. We do not have to infer this; the prosecuting attorney explicitly revealed that his motive was to call a witness who had such knowledge in the hope that the jury would speculate about the extraneous offense even if the appellant did not carelessly open the door to inquiry about it.2
A variation on this improper tactic may be found in Watson v. State, 605 S.W.2d 877 (Tex.Cr.App.1980). The State called as a reputation witness a woman who said, “I haven’t talked to anybody about him. * * [I know] only that he tried to kill me.” Nevertheless, she was allowed to testify that the defendant’s reputation was bad. This court held of course that it was error to admit such testimony, but on rehearing held that the error was harmless. Mitchell v. State, 524 S.W.2d 510 (Tex.Cr.App.1975), was cited.
Today’s majority opinion also mentions Mitchell, so I think it is worthwhile to draw a distinction. Mitchell was tried for robbery. The police chief of the town in which the robbery occurred had no knowledge of Mitchell’s reputation other than the robbery itself and Mitchell’s rap sheet, yet he was allowed to testify that Mitchell’s reputation was bad; this was harmless error. There was no testimony about an extraneous offense and no attempt to inject inadmissible evidence of an unadjudicated offense. Presiding Judge Onion’s concurring opinion, 524 S.W.2d at 515, was well taken:
“I would caution against interpreting the majority’s opinion as meaning that in any case the State is entitled to one free unqualified reputation witness provided there are other reputation witnesses to the same effect whose testimony is unchallenged. Each case must stand on its own bottom. For the State to call a well-known, respected and popular citizen or law enforcement officer as a reputation witness knowing he is not a qualified witness while hoping to render any error harmless by calling other witnesses who are qualified would, in my opinion, be bad faith.”
I take it that “bad faith” includes some.thing more than erroneous admission of evidence; it implies misconduct by the prosecuting attorneys.
In today’s case there was such misconduct — an improper attempt to inject inadmissible evidence — and the court has held that it contributed to the denial of a fair trial. This issue of misconduct was not raised in Watson, and had it been raised that case might have had a different result. The prosecutors in Watson must have been calling that victim of an extraneous offense only for the improper motive of trying to inject inadmissible evidence, the same motive that is before us today.
The law of evidence does not now permit proof of character by evidence of opinion3 *808or unadjudicated offenses.4 It would be proper for a prosecuting attorney to seek to change the law. It is not proper for him to evade the law, to violate it by winks and innuendoes, to do directly what he may not do directly. Such tactics with reputation witnesses are all too common in some counties.
There is a sad irony in this case: the State’s counsel was intentionally violating a law in order to increase the punishment for the intentional violation of another law. In a criminal trial, law violators should not be found at both tables. Violations of law cannot be used to enforce law. Justice Clark wrote in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659, 81 S.Ct. 1684, 1694, 6 L.Ed.2d 1081 (1961):
“Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws .... As Mr. Justice Brandéis, dissenting, said in Olmstead v. United States, 1928, 277 U.S. 438, 485, 48 S.Ct. 564, 575, 72 L.Ed. 944: ‘Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. * * * If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.’ ”

. Although the majority opinion holds that Officer Gonzales’ testimony was struck properly, it does not reveal that in so holding it has rejected the State’s argument that Gonzales was a qualified witness because he had discussed the appellant’s reputation with the prosecuting attorneys. The flaw in letting counsel manufacture their own reputation witness is too clear for discussion, but by this footnote I hope to reveal that the argument was raised and rejected in this case.

. The prosecuting attorney argued: “You had another police officer come in and say he met him on July 14, 1978, and his reputation is bad. * * * [Tjhat same man told you that he knew him and he met him in San Antonio, not in Dallas, and there were no questions beyond that so you can think about that for a minute. You can put all of these things together ...”

. Gholson v. State, 542 S.W.2d 395, 402 (Tex.Cr.App.1976). This rule has been criticized severely and the modern statutes allow opinion evidence. See generally the panel opinion in Watson v. State, 605 S.W.2d 877, nn. 3-4 (Tex. Cr.App.1980).

. Tex.Code Crim.Pro, arts. 38.29 & 37.07, sec. 3(a).