Court Opinion

ID: 9673564
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 04:14:32.33009+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:22.841316
License: Public Domain

ROBERTS, Judge,
dissenting.
Today, in this case and in Grijalva v. State, 614 S.W.2d 420, and Londres v. State, 614 S.W.2d 407, the Court holds that the judgments of guilt must be reversed and the cases remanded for entirely new trials. The only errors that have produced these results were errors in excusing jurors who indicated that the death penalty might affect their deliberations. These errors were violations of the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments. Adams v. Texas, 448 U.S. 38, 100 S.Ct. 2521, 65 L.Ed.2d 581 (1980). The Constitution of the United States does not require that the judgments of guilt be reversed; it only “disentitles the State to execute a sentence of death imposed by a jury from which such prospective jurors have been excluded.” 448 U.S. at 50, 100 S.Ct. at 2529; Witherspoon v. Illinois, 391 U.S. 510, 522-523 n. 21, 88 S.Ct. 1770, 1777 n. 21, 20 L.Ed.2d 776 (1968) (“Nor, finally, does today’s holding render invalid the conviction, as opposed to the sentence, in this or any other case.”).
There is nothing in the Constitution that requires us to set aside the judgments of guilt (which are free of error so far as the Court tells us); to cloak the properly-convicted appellants in the presumption of innocence; to require the State to marshal evidence’that is years and years old; and to require the sizeable expenditure of time and money that attends a capital trial. If all this is to happen, it must be because of state law, and in these cases it is state law that is wrongly applied.
As the Court points out, we “may reform or correct [a] judgment as the law and the nature of the case may require.” Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, Article 44.24(b) (emphasis supplied). In Ocker v. State, 477 S.W.2d 233 (Tex.Cr.App.1972), we held that the grant of Article 44.24(b) was the limit of our power, and that “the law and nature” of that case would not permit us to assess punishment when the death penalty had been voided by Witherspoon error.
What the Court fails to appreciate today is that “the law and nature of the case” are different today than they were when Ocker and Whan v. State, 485 S.W.2d 275 (Tex.Cr.App.1972), were decided.
At that time the punishment for murder was death or confinement for life or for any term of years not less than two. 1927 Texas General Laws, ch. 274, Sec. 1, Texas *419Revised Penal Code of 1925, Art. 1257 (repealed in 1973). The punishment for rape was death or confinement for life or for any term of years not less than five. Texas Revised Penal Code of 1925, Art. 1189 (repealed in 1974). We denied the State’s motion to reform the punishment, saying (Ocker v. State, 477 S.W.2d at 290):
“Thus ... the alternative punishment is not fixed by law, but encompasses a wide range. If this Court were to reduce the sentence to life imprisonment we would be assessing punishment as we saw fit, not as required by law. We would be performing a function which properly belongs to the jury. If our statutes provided for a fixed punishment in lieu of the death penalty, the situation would be closely akin to the cases in which the punishment is absolutely fixed, and in which- this Court has assessed punishment.”
In 1973 new capital punishment statutes were enacted. The punishment for the only capital offense (capital murder) is death or confinement for life. If the death penalty be unavailable (as it was, in the constitutional sense, in these cases), there is only one, fixed penalty remaining: confinement for life. The law and nature of the case now permits us to render the only possible punishments that these juries could have assessed, in light of their being selected in violation of Witherspoon : confinement for life. This would not be a commutation or an assessment of punishment; it would be the rendition of the only punishment that was possible on the valid judgment of guilt. No “direct[ion] of a new trial before a different jury on the issue of punishment” is required; there is no issue of punishment left in the case, for only one punishment was constitutionally possible.
Today we are indeed following “the consistent policy of this Court that although the error is to penalty alone, the cause must be reversed for an entirely new trial.” The Court is so consistent that it fails to notice that the reasons for the policy no longer obtain in these cases.*
In Grijalva v. State, 614 S.W.2d 420, decided today, the Court suggests a somewhat different reason for reversing the untainted judgment of guilt:
“Even though the error affects only the death penalty, it is not such error as would preclude the State from seeking the death penalty on a retrial. We therefore are unable to reform the punishment to life and affirm.”
This seems to me to be foreign to our role as an appellate court under the Texas Constitution. As the Court holds in Evans, above, we are bound to do what “the law and nature of the case may require.” Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, Article 44.-24(b). Yet the court frankly admits in Gri-jalva that it is giving more relief than the error requires; it is reversing an untainted judgment of guilt. It does this because the error does not “preclude the State from seeking the death penalty on a retrial.” That is to say, the Court is giving relief to the State in the form of another trial and another chance at the death penalty. This is in effect giving the State an appeal in a criminal case, which is forbidden by Article V, Section 26, of the Texas Constitution.
The Court is correct in noticing the errors in jury selection in these cases, but it grants the wrong relief. I dissent.

 On the subject of consistency, see the epigram in McEIwee v. State, 589 S.W.2d 455, 455 (Tex. Cr.App.1979) (Onion, J.).