Court Opinion

ID: 9767546
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 05:21:06.897647+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:31.721811
License: Public Domain

BAIRD, Judge,
concurring on Appellee’s Petition for Discretionary Review.
I write separately to address the majority’s treatment of Farrell v. State, 864 S.W.2d 501 (Tex.Cr.App.1993), which is neither an anomaly nor undermined by Bigley v. State, 865 S.W.2d 26 (Tex.Cr.App.1993).
As stated in Farrell:
In order to ensure that [the Court of Criminal Appeals] reviewfs] only decisions of the courts of appeals, we insist that the parties, in an orderly and timely fashion, provide the courts of appeals with the first opportunity to resolve the various issues associated with the appeal. This orderly and timely presentation is accomplished by requiring the parties to raise their points of error and the responses thereto in their original briefs to the courts of appeals.
Id. 864 S.W.2d at 503. This has been the law since at least Tallant v. State, 742 S.W.2d 292 (Tex.Cr.App.1987), and presumably since 1981 when the courts of appeals acquired criminal jurisdiction. This is also true when the parties desire a particular result, e.g., an acquittal, an entirely new trial, a new punishment hearing or the deletion of a deadly weapon finding. In Farrell, the State asked us to find that the Court of Appeals erred in not reforming the judgment to the lesser offense rather than an acquittal.
At the time of Farrell the courts of appeals, under Tex.R.App. P. 80(b), had the authority to either reform the judgment or render a judgment of acquittal. Consequently, we could not have held the Court of Appeals “erred” in entering a judgment that it was fully entitled to enter; Rule 80(b) is permissive and, therefore, does not mandate a particular judgment in such circumstances. In Bigley, the defendant argued that an acquittal was the only judgment the Court of Appeals could enter. We rejected that argument and held “Rule 80 empowers the courts of appeals to reform judgments” to reflect convictions for lesser offenses. Consequently, there is no conflict between Farrell and Bigley, and one should not be created by the majority. Farrell simply stands for the proposition that if the parties desire a particular result they should ask for it.1 Bigley holds that the courts of appeals have the option of rendering judgments of acquittal or reforming the trial court’s judgment to reflect a conviction for a lesser offense.
With these comments, I join only the judgment of the Court.

. The majority takes a gratuitous swipe at n. 3 of Farrell. Majority op. at 510, n. 2. The majority misquotes the note and then expresses confusion at its meaning. Note 3, quoted correctly, states: "A reformation was not requested by the State in its original brief or in a motion for rehearing." (The italicized portion was omitted by the majority.) The footnote was included to make it clear that the State never asked the Court of Appeals to reform the judgment. Had that request been made, the Court of Appeals, either on original submission or on rehearing, could have reformed the judgment. In such an event, this Court would not have disturbed that decision. Bigley, supra.