Court Opinion

ID: 9772981
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 17:34:24.237388+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:31:49.567372
License: Public Domain

CLINTON, Judge,
dissenting.
By holding that the announcement of ready on the first indictment carries over to the subsequent indictment, the majority glosses over the significance of an enhancement or repeater allegation and misconstrues the Speedy Trial Act.
Asserting the subsequent indictment “simply added a punishment allegation for enhancement purposes,” the majority ignores the fact that the State had substantially enlarged its burden of proof. As the author of the majority opinion observed in Henson v. State, 530 S.W.2d 584 (Tex.Cr.App.1975):
“Such additional [enhancement] allegations were not minor alterations of the pleadings but constituted new allegations unrelated to the original offense, that might have substantively affected the accused’s preparation for trial,_[emphasis supplied].”
Since a prior conviction allegation adds to the State’s burden of proof in a substantial way, the State’s preparation for trial is commensurately affected — or certainly should be affected.1 In this case the State did not assert it was ready to meet its burden of proof on the added allegation until the day of trial, more than two months after the 120 days had run.
While I have been able, for purposes of the Speedy Trial Act, to see the merit in assigning a presumption of readiness to a prosecutor’s bare announcement of it at any point after the criminal action has commenced, it defies common sense, and certainly logic, to say the prosecutor is thereby presumed to be also ready on any substantial allegation he may add in the future!
The majority’s purported distinction between the circumstances presented here and those in Richardson v. State, 629 S.W.2d 164 (Tex.App.-Dallas 1982) — that here the State has not altered “the case” charging the primary offense — does not justify obviation of a timely announcement of ready on the second and ultimate indictment on which appellant was tried.2
*88To another example of the unreasoned extreme to which the Court will go to deny relief under the Speedy Trial Act, I must dissent.
TEAGUE, J., joins.

. Given the number of cases this Court and the courts of appeals must remand for new punishment hearings or reverse, on account of the State’s failure to establish the finality, sequence, evidentiary sufficiency, etc., of prior convictions alleged for punishment increases, it appears that prosecutors may already critically underestimate the amount of preparation which attends such allegations. Today the Court sanctions this without any explication.

. The author of the majority opinion also wrote the opinion for the Court in Rosebury v. State, 659 S.W.2d 655 (Tex.Cr.App.1983) and there, as here, relied indirectly on the reasoning of the court of appeals in Richardson, supra: that the *88critical feature (when successive indictments are involved) is whether they are "subject to different proof' for purposes of determining whether an act by either party on the first, should carry over to those succeeding it. It essentially distills to a question of the intent of the parties.
I would think this reasoning should influence the Court in the instant case as well, and in all sincerity do not understand the majority's action today.