Court Opinion

ID: 9674503
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 04:29:58.774171+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:27.636089
License: Public Domain

TEAGUE, Judge,
concurring and dissenting.
The majority opinion by Presiding Judge Onion correctly sustains the judgment of the court of appeals that held that the admitted evidence going to the fair market value of the complainant’s automobile when it was stolen was insufficient.
It is or should now be axiomatic that the owner of the involved property can testify to its fair market value, even if he could not qualify to testify about the value of like property belonging to someone else. However, as Justice Spears of the Supreme Court of Texas recently pointed out in Porras v. Craig, 675 S.W.2d 503 (Tex.1984), “Even an owner's testimony, however, is subject to some restrictions. In order for a property owner to qualify as a witness to the [value] of his property, his testimony must show that it refers to market, rather than intrinsic or some other value of the property. This requirement is usually met by asking the witness if he is familiar with the market value of his property. (Citations omitted.)” (504-505). (My emphasis.) For obvious reasons, “fair market value” and “trade-in value” are patently not the same. “Trade-in value” usually amounts only to intrinsic value, not to the owner, but to the person who pays the owner for his trade-in, which figure as we all have learned in our lifetimes when we traded in a vehicle may actually be far above or below actual fair market value, i.e., the price that is agreed upon for the vehicle that is going to replace the trade-in vehicle usually governs the price that will be paid for the trade-in vehicle. It may far exceed the actual fair market value or it may actually be well below the actual fair market value; it just depends on how good a “horse trader” the owner of the trade-in vehicle might be.
In this instance, the complaining witness’s testimony constituted no evidence of the fair market value of his automobile when it was stolen from him because his testimony only went to the amount of money that he received for the automobile when he traded it in after the automobile had been recovered. We are not given any details of what occurred when he traded in his automobile.
The majority opinion correctly holds that the evidence was insufficient to establish beyond a reasonable doubt the fair market value of the stolen automobile.
I am unable to agree, however, that the majority opinion has satisfactorily distinguished what a majority of this Court stated in Sullivan v. State, 701 S.W.2d 905 (Tex.Cr.App.1986). Of course, for the reasons that I gave in the dissenting opinion that I filed in that cause, that case should be quickly and expressly overruled. I find that the problem with Sullivan, supra, lies in the following statement: “However, when the owner of the property is testify*440ing as to the value of the property, he or she may testify as to his or her opinion or estimate of the value in general and commonly understood terms.” (909). If that statement is “good” law, which I strongly disagree that it is, the majority opinion certainly needs to discuss it or expressly overrule it. Because the majority declines to expressly overrule Sullivan, supra, I am compelled to dissent.
For the above and foregoing reasons, I both concur and dissent.