Court Opinion

ID: 9857464
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 14:36:03.504255+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:42:31.908400
License: Public Domain

MEYERS, Judge,
concurring.
The problem presented by this case is not so uncommon as we may suppose. Determining whether the evidence adduced at trial proves the alleged offense or a so-called “extraneous offense” is occasionally a matter of considerable importance and often quite difficult to do. Without exploring every context in which the question is critical, a single recent example well illustrates the problem. In Thomason v. State, 892 S.W.2d 8 (Tex.Crim.App.1994), the appellant was convicted of stealing money from his employer by a scam involving the purchase of computers that did not exist. During the course of a single year, he committed ten such bogus transactions, eight of which met the description given by the indictment of his offense. Any one of these eight might have been the offense charged. I say “might” because the indictment was not drawn with enough specificity to identify in advance which offense the State intended to prove at trial. But, because our law does not require indictments to be drawn with any greater specificity than this, Thomason was not entitled to quash it for failure to give him specific notice of the crime with which he was charged.
That does not mean, of course, that Tho-mason’s indictment charged him with more than one offense any more than the indictment here charged Rankin with more than one offense. But, just as surely, the allegation of one crime did not rule out the possibility that either defendant was actually guilty of several crimes exactly like the one charged. Clearly, the evidence was sufficient to prove that Thomason and Rankin both committed more than one such offense, offenses which actually amounted to multiple violations of the same penal statute, “on or about” the same date and, in Thomason’s case, against the same victim.
The peculiarity of this situation, in which an accusatory pleading charging a single offense with as much specificity as the law requires may refer to any one of several distinct crimes, is precisely what generated the argument, rejected in Thomason, that the indictment there actually alleged a single offense under authority of a statute which permits separate theft offenses to be prosecuted as if they were a single crime. We rejected that argument because our precedents require a prosecution of several thefts as a single offense to be supported by an indictment which specifically alleges that multiple thefts were committed “pursuant to one scheme or continuing course of conduct.” Accordingly, we held in Thomason that the indictment charged one crime only and that the one crime charged was not an aggregate version of the eight crimes proven. But we also remanded to the Court of Appeals for a decision whether the State should have been required to elect at trial which of the eight offenses proven it would use to support conviction. Clearly, we would not have done that if we thought seven of the eight offenses were extraneous to the offense charged, since a jury may not be authorized to convict an accused of extraneous offenses.
Does that mean that none of the offenses actually proven at Thomason’s trial was extraneous or that seven of them were extraneous but that nobody could tell which ones they were until the State elected which offense it wanted to rely upon for conviction? Thomason himself evidently thought the latter. His points of error on appeal were that the State should have elected which offense to submit for jury consideration and that the trial judge should then have instructed the jury that the others were extraneous offenses, not to be considered except for a limited purpose. In my opinion, it makes far more sense to hold that none of the eight offenses proven against Thomason was an extraneous offense at all, since proof of any one would fully satisfy the allegations of the indictment. I agree, of course, that the State was required by Thomason’s demand to make an election and that the jury should not, thereafter, have been permitted to convict Thomason in that proceeding of any *743uneleeted offense. But either way, it is perfectly clear under the precedents of this Court that cases such as Thomason and this one present a situation in which the State may elect to have any one of the proven offenses which satisfies the allegations of the accusatory pleading or of an offense included within it submitted for jury consideration.
The main thing that distinguishes Rankin from Thomason in the present context is that, unlike Thomason, he did not ask the State to elect which of the offenses proven at trial it wanted to rely on for a conviction. Clearly, his unusual defensive strategy militated strongly against such a tactic. But he did not thereby avoid the bite of our case law. When the evidence proves two or more instances of misconduct, either of which would support conviction for the alleged offense, and the defendant does not demand an election before the case is submitted for jury consideration, this Court has deemed the evidence sufficient for conviction if it adequately proves either instance of misconduct. Espinoza v. State, 638 S.W.2d 479 (Tex.Crim.App.1982). Of course, under these circumstances, we also consider a subsequent prosecution for any such instance of misconduct to be jeopardy barred because it is impossible to determine which offense the jury actually found the defendant to be guilty of. Marshall v. State, 432 S.W.2d 918 (Tex.Crim.App.1968).
It follows that the prosecutor was quite right in the instant cause to argue that the jury might convict appellant for either offense proven at trial. That is exactly how this Court would have analyzed the problem if confronted with it as a challenge to the sufficiency of evidence on appeal. Surely, it cannot be beyond the jury’s power to do so when assessing the weight of evidence at trial. And if the jury was authorized to convict of either offense, it cannot have been error to let the prosecutor argue for such a verdict.
Were we to hold in this cause that Rankin did not confess to the charged offense but only to an extraneous offense for which he could not lawfully be convicted in this cause, it would represent a rather dramatic departure from the way in which we have generally treated such situations in past eases. Because the treatment afforded such cases seems right to me and has not, in any event, been impugned by the parties in this cause, I would be loathe to support any position which overrules it sub silentio. Accordingly, I concur in the Court’s judgment and, with these additional remarks, join its opinion.