Court Opinion

ID: 9779489
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 22:02:27.319172+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:33:27.025198
License: Public Domain

DAUPHINOT, Justice,
dissenting.
The majority, in its thorough and well-written opinion, hold that the nonaceompliee evidence is sufficient to corroborate the accomplice testimony in proving Brosky guilty of engaging in organized criminal activity and that prosecution was not barred by Bra-sky’s double jeopardy claim. I respectfully dissent. The majority has misconstrued the requirements for corroboration of accomplice testimony. They have, thereby, incorrectly applied the law to the facts of this case.
Through their incorrect application, the majority finds the nonaceompliee testimony sufficient to connect Brosky to the offense, not of murder, but to the offense of engaging in organized criminal activity. Brosky was tried and convicted as a party to the murder of Donald Thomas in 1993. The jury assessed his punishment at ten years probated and found he neither used nor exhibited a deadly weapon in the commission of the offense. Brosky was subsequently indicted and tried for engaging in organized criminal activity in Thomas’s murder. If proving Brosky was a party to murder is sufficient to prove the organized criminal activity, then the majority admits there is no distinction between the elements necessary to prove murder as a party and those necessary to prove engaging in organized criminal activity. Brosky is, then, correct in claiming he has already been tried for this offense. His double jeopardy claim should be sustained.1 If proving Brosky a party to murder is not sufficient to connect him to engaging in organized criminal activity, the evidence is insufficient to support his conviction in the case before us.
Even if Brosky was in the back seat of the car at the time of the shooting, unless his membership in white supremacist groups or his participation as a party to the murder constituted the organized criminal activity, there is no evidence to connect him to 1) an intent to establish, maintain, or participate in a combination, and 2) a conspiracy to commit murder, separate and apart from his participation in the murder as a party.
The elements of engaging in organized criminal activity are that: 1) a person; 2) with intent to establish, maintain, or participate in a combination; 3) commits2 or conspires to commit; 4) murder.3 A “combination” means three or more persons who collaborate in carrying on criminal activities.4 “Conspiracy to commit” means to agree with one or more persons that they or one or more of them engage in conduct that would constitute the offense and the person and one or more of them perform an overt act in pursuance of the agreement. An agreement constituting conspiring to commit may be inferred from the *145acts of the parties.
The elements necessary to convict a person as a party to an offense are that the person: 1) acts with intent to promote or assist the commission of the offense, and 2) solicits, encourages, directs, or aids the other person to commit the offense.6
Section 7.02(b), in describing party liability, refers to the end product of acting with others as a “conspiracy,” and to the persons participating in furtherance of the unlawful purpose as “conspirators.” The penal code uses the terms parties and conspirators interchangeably.7 In fact, neither the party nor the co-conspirator is required to be present at the time of the commission of the murder. In Robinson v. State,8 the Court of Criminal Appeals stated that to be guilty as a party, if not present at the commission of the offense, the person must himself actively engage in the furtherance of the common purpose and design at some other place.
In the case before us, Brosky is charged with engaging in organized criminal activity. The commission of any single overt act, if it was committed in furtherance of the murder, is sufficient to establish the actor as a party to the murder. What, then, sets the organized criminal activity apart from prosecution of the murder? It is not the overt acts. Is it the agreement? Remember, the jury was given a charge that allowed them to infer an agreement from the acts of the parties. If we are to believe the Court of Criminal Appeals meant what it said in Robinson, the agreement to commit the murder is sufficient to make one a party to the murder. By examining how Texas courts have traditionally construed the law of parties, it becomes clear that the “agreement” does not distinguish engaging in organized criminal activity from acting as a party as our court held in the majority opinion and in Ex parte Bro-sky.9
Middleton v. State10 sets out the law of criminal responsibility for members of a joint criminal enterprise. Today we call it “the law of parties.” Mere presence does not give rise to criminal responsibility.11 The Court of Criminal Appeals stated that in order to prove a person a party to a criminal offense, “the evidence must show, and the charge of the trial court submit, that at the time of the commission of the offense, the parties must be acting together, each doing some part in the execution of the common purpose.”12
In a long line of cases, the Court of Criminal Appeals has further clarified the law of parties. In Mayfield v. State,13 the Court explained that because section 7.02 of the Penal Code requires both encouragement of and intent to promote the commission of the offense, mere presence at the scene of an offense does not make that person a party to the offense, absent an agreement. This agreement, then, that the offense should be committed, coupled with presence at the scene of the crime, establishes both encouragement of and intent to promote the commission of the offense.
The Court of Criminal Appeals further instructs us that in determining whether an individual is a party to an offense, the court may look to events before, dining and after the commission of the offense.14 Importantly, the Court states that evidence of an “agreement” to commit an offense and, thereby, act as a party may be inferred from the evidence:
‘An agreement of parties to act together in a common design can seldom be proved by words, but reliance can often be had on the actions of the parties showing an un*146derstanding and a common design to do a certain act....’
Participation in an enterprise may be inferred from the circumstances and need not be shown by direct evidence. Circumstantial evidence may be sufficient to show that one is a party to the offense.15
This court has followed the teaching of the Court of Criminal Appeals.16
The trial court in the case before us instructed the jury that “the agreement of the parties may be inferred from their actions.” In the first trial and based upon the same acts by the parties, the jury was allowed to convict Brosky of murder as a party by inferring an agreement to act together in a common design. Therefore, while murder alone does not require proof of an agreement, murder as a party does require such proof.17 In fact, the agreement is an essential element in proving murder under the law of parties. The elements of murder as a party and of engaging in organized criminal activity as alleged in the indictment before us are, then, the same, except that murder has an additional element of actually causing the death. And it is the offense of engaging in organized criminal activity that requires corroboration in the case before us, not simply the murder for which Brosky has already been convicted as a party.
The “Accomplice Witness Rule” prohibits conviction based upon the testimony of any accomplice unless that testimony is corroborated by the evidence tending to connect the defendant with the offense committed, and the corroboration is not sufficient if it merely shows the commission of the offense.18 The need for non-accomplice corroborating testimony is especially great in this case due to Hendry’s and Roberts’s initial attempts to frame Brosky as the shooter. The testimony of Brosky’s accomplices is inherently suspect and, without corroboration, cannot form the basis for conviction.19
In order to convict Brosky of engaging in organized criminal activity, the jury was charged with finding that Brosky not only agreed with his co-conspirators to engage in conduct constituting the offense, with the intent to establish, maintain, or participate in a combination, but also that he and at least one of the co-conspirators performed an overt act in furtherance of that agreement. The majority is correct when it states that in order to determine whether an accomplice’s testimony is corroborated, we must eliminate all accomplice evidence from the record and determine whether inculpatory facts and circumstances in evidence tend to connect Bro-sky to the offense of engaging in organized criminal activity.20
In the case before us, all the evidence linking Brosky with the commission of engaging in organized criminal activity comes from his accomplices. Absent their testimony, even the legal gymnastics performed by the majority cannot do more with the corroborating evidence than simply place Brosky in the presence of Hendry and Roberts. The majority relies heavily on the nonaccomplice evidence of:
• Brosky’s fingerprint found in the ear. (Although it could not be established when the print was left, and clearly a print inside the car does not corroborate a statement that Brosky helped push the car.)
• Sloan and Riddle’s testimony that someone in the car wore a white baseball cap at the time of the murder.
•.Detective Rosas’s testimony that Brosky was wearing a white baseball cap when arrested at the same location where police *147found Roberts’s shotgun hidden in a closet. (Brosky was not inside the apartment until asked by Rosas to go inside. Rosas merely found him in the apartment complex generally, specifically at the pool.)
• Brosky’s involvement in the skinhead movement.
• Hendry’s mother’s statement to the officer that her son had been with “Chris” on the night in question, and Roberts’s response, when questioned by the officer about Hendry’s mother’s statement, to lead the officer to Brosky. (The majority does not explain how a statement elicited to show the officer’s state of mind can be considered as corroborating evidence.)
This evidence does nothing more than possibly tend to establish that Brosky went along for a ride. Nowhere is there corroboration of Brosky’s participation in an overt act to further the killing of Thomas or even his intent to commit the offense.
The State argues, vehemently, that Bro-sky’s long-term participation in skinhead activities establishes the requisite agreement concerning the conspiracy to commit a racially-motivated murder. It asserts that the conspiratorial combination was established by the nonaccompliee testimony that placed Brosky and Roberts in hard-core skinhead organizations advocating violence against various racial, ethnic, and social minorities. However, the State does not provide for us, nor have we been able to find, authority for the proposition that Brosky’s participation in the “combination” responsible for Thomas’s murder in the early hours of June 7 may be corroborated by Brosky’s membership in skinhead groups and advocacy of their views generally. Were we to find Brosky’s membership in these groups sufficient to corroborate his participation in the “combination” that performed a murder at a particular time, we could be paving the way for the prosecution of political or social activists who express their views in vitriolic or hyperbolic terms but who cannot be linked to a discrete conspiracy to commit a specific offense.
And even Brosky’s involvement in the skinhead movement was not proved through facts, but rather through a myriad of skinhead leaflets, posters, photographs, and song lyrics that were not even connected to Bro-sky. I disagree with the majority’s dismissal of Brosky’s points of error nine through twelve that deal with the prejudicial effect of this mass of evidence when they assert that Brosky waived his complaint by allowing some evidence of skinhead activities to come in without objection and that the evidence demonstrated the nature of the combination and the motivation for it, which was shared by a “host of hate groups that they did not necessarily belong to.”
Specifically, the cassette tape entitled “Nigger at the end of a Rope” and a poster size transcription of the lyrics were introduced into evidence although the tape did not belong to Brosky, Hendry, or Roberts and none of the three could “remember sitting there and actually listening to that song that night.” The State successfully argued at trial that the song “goes to show motive, intent ... and the type of racial violence that [Brosky] advocates and a common purpose for the conspiracy.” But how can the majority use that evidence to establish Brosky’s role in this criminal combination? And if it does tend to establish that, then would not it also be true that listeners of rap music espousing desires to kill police officers or abuse women are part of criminal combinations to commit those acts whenever they occur?
A quick review of the State’s case against Brosky reveals an almost complete lack of nonaccompliee evidence. Brosky spent the night of June 6-7, 1991 with Hendry and Roberts. The three spent much of the late evening and early morning talking around a table in Hendry’s bedroom. Brosky shared Hendry’s and Roberts’s concerns about the declining reputation of the local skinhead movement. We know this only because Hen-dry and Roberts told us. Brosky implicitly agreed to participate in a drive-by shooting suggested by Roberts to restore the reputation of the skinhead movement; that was the testimony of Hendry and Roberts. The only portion of this scenario that could be corroborated by nonaccomplice testimony was Ro-sas’s comment that Ann Hendry said her son was with “another kid” named “Chris” on the evening of June 6-7, 1991, but even if we assume that the “Chris” referred to by Ann *148Hendry was in fact Brosky, Ms mere presence in the company of Hendry and Roberts at some point during the evening is insufficient to corroborate the offense of engaging in organized criminal activity.
Brosky was the first of the three to leave the house by climbing out of Hendry’s bedroom window; Hendry and Roberts said he was. It was Roberts who reassured Hendry that Brosky could be trusted. Brosky held Roberts’s shotgun as the latter climbed out through the window; we know tMs only because that was Roberts’s testimony. Brosky helped push Hendry’s car out of the driveway so that the noise of its engine would not disturb Hendry’s mother. How do we know that Brosky helped push the car? Hendry and Roberts told the jury he did. We know Brosky eventually got into the car and rode in the back seat, only because Roberts said he did. We know that Brosky was wearing a white baseball cap while seated in the car, because Roberts and Hendry told us he was. Roberts and Hendry told us that the three were listening to skinhead music advocating racial hatred during their search for a victim. No one else overheard any of the lyrics of the “Boot Town Boys” or any of the other hate groups whose messages were played in the car.
We know that the three passed a police car during their drive through Arlington because Hendry told us so. It is not clear whether Hendry or Roberts first spotted Thomas, but Hendry testified that Brosky told Roberts the potential victim had been spied. Brosky handed Roberts the murder weapon, wMch had been in the back seat, so that Roberts could open fire. How do we know that Bro-sky handled the gun immediately before the shooting? Roberts told us he did. Brosky shouted “Shoot!” just before Roberts pulled the trigger; Hendry alone heard him.
It was Hendry who testified that Brosky kept a lookout for Sloan’s pursmt of the Mustang, and it was Hendry who told the jury that Brosky handed Roberts the shotgun when the latter contemplated firing on Sloan. Sloan and Riddle saw oMy a white baseball cap on the head of a back-seat passenger. They never saw a face of the backseat passenger, and neither heard anyone shout “Shoot” before the murder. Finally, after the three returned to Hendry’s home, it was Roberts who claimed Brosky placed one of the shotgun shells in the toilet to dispose of the evidence. How did Roberts know tMs? Because Hendry told Roberts that is what Brosky did.
Brosky’s fingerprint on the inside of Hen-dxys car, the statement that “Chris” had been with Hendry on the evening in question, and Roberts’s identification of Brosky as the “Chris” he and Hendry had been with on June 6-7, 1991 establish Brosky’s presence but fail to corroborate his intent to engage in organized criminal activity. Sloan’s and Riddle’s testimony that someone in the car wore a wMte baseball cap tends to support testimony that Brosky was in the back seat of the car at the time of the shooting; however, mere presence at the target offense is insufficient to corroborate accomplice witness testimony as to the organized criminal activity.21
After eliminating all accomplice evidence from the record to determine whether incul-patory facts and circumstances in evidence tend to connect Brosky to the offense in cMef, that is, to the organized criminal activity, I find that the evidence does not tend to establish that he did anything more than go along for a ride at the time of the murder. TMs nonaccomplice evidence is insufficient to sustain Ms conviction for engaging in organized criminal activity:
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and if the State must rely on the accomplice’s testimony for some material fact without any corroboration whatsoever, the conviction cannot stand. It is unfortunate that designing criminals sometimes so lay the scene of their activities that there is great difficulty in proving their guilt, and more unfortunate still is it that frequently the State is not able to do so, but such is no argument in favor of a rule wMch would permit the conviction of innocent people on the testimony of a party or parties involved in the crime, or that reliance may be had on, “the finger of suspicion.” For the purpose of corroborating *149testimony which is considered too unreliable to take human liberty, something stronger is required than mere suspicion. This court has always so held.22
As a result, I believe that the State faded to corroborate Hendry’s and Roberts’s testimony. The law is clear that the mere presence of an accused in the company of an accomplice shortly before or after the commission of an offense is not in itself sufficient corroboration of accomplice testimony to support conviction of a defendant.23 The majority misconstrues the requirements for corroboration of accomplice testimony, or else the majority forgets that Brosky was on trial, not for murder either as a principal or as a party, but rather for the offense of engaging in organized criminal activity. Simply spending time with people who post racially directed hate propaganda on their walls does not satisfy the requirements of corroboration of engaging in organized criminal activity.
For the above reasons I respectfully dissent.

. This question was not squarely before this court in Ex parte Brosky, 863 S.W.2d 783 (Tex.App. — Fort Worth 1993, no pet.) because we could not know what evidence would be offered to prove Brosky engaged in organized criminal activity.

. Brosky was not indicted for committing the murder, only conspiring to commit.

. TexPenal Code Ann. § 71.02(a)(1) (Vernon Supp.1996).

. TexPenal Code Ann. § 71.01(a) (Vernon 1994).

. See TexPenal Code Ann. § 7.02(a)(2) (Vernon 1994).

. Compare TexPenal Code Ann. § 7.02(b) with § 71.01.

. 493 S.W.2d 780, 782 (Tex.Crim.App.1973).

. 863 S.W.2d at 788.

. 86 Tex.Crim. 307, 217 S.W. 1046 (1920).

. Id. 217 S.W. at 1053 (op. onreh’g).

. Id. (emphasis added).

. 716 S.W.2d 509, 517 (Tex.Crim.App.1986).

. Wygal v. State, 555 S.W.2d 465, 468-69 (Tex.Crim.App.1977).

. Id. at 469 (emphasis added).

. In re A.B., 868 S.W.2d 938, 941 (Tex.App.— Fort Worth 1994, no writ).

. See, e.g., Blackstock v. State, 115 Tex.Crim. 284, 29 S.W.2d 365 (1930); Cone v. State, 86 Tex.Crim. 291, 216 S.W. 190 (1919); Machado v. State, 494 S.W.2d 859 (Tex.Crim.App.1973); Haddad v. State, 860 S.W.2d 947 (Tex.App.— Dallas 1993, pet. ref'd); Horton v. State, 880 S.W.2d 22 (Tex.App. — Tyler 1993, pet. ref'd).

. TexCode Crim.Proc.Ann. art. 38.14 (Vernon 1979).

. See Walker v. State, 615 S.W.2d 728 (Tex.Crim.App. [Panel Op.] 1981).

. See Munoz v. State, 853 S.W.2d 558, 559 (Tex.Crim.App.1993).

. See Etheredge v. State, 542 S.W.2d 148, 150 (Tex.Crim.App.1976).

. Almazan v. State, 140 Tex.Crim. 432, 145 S.W.2d 576, 579 (1940).

. Etheredge, 542 S.W.2d at 150.