Court Opinion

ID: 9641026
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:21:12.107529+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:34.556657
License: Public Domain

ROBERTS, Judge,
concurring.
Article 1223 of our former Penal Code provided:
“When the homicide takes place to prevent murder, maiming, disfiguring or castration, if the weapon or means used by the party attempting or committing such murder, maiming, disfiguring or castration are such as would have been calculated to produce that result, it is to be presumed that the person so using them designed to inflict the injury.”
As we said in Sistrunk v. State, 486 S.W.2d 304, 305:
“The purpose of Article 1223, supra, is to require that the jury be told by the trial court that if a deceased or injured party was making an attack upon a defendant with a deadly weapon or with a weapon which from the manner of its use was calculated to produce death or serious bodily injury, the law presumes that the deceased, or injured party, intended either to kill or to inflict serious bodily injury on the accused.”
Accord: Borroum v. State, 168 Tex.Cr.R. 552, 331 S.W.2d 314 (1960).
As Judge Davidson wrote in Borroum, the statute served an important function: It took “from the realm of speculation the intent of the deceased as an issue of fact and, under certain circumstances, fixe[d] his intent as a matter of law, and such intent [was] therefore binding upon the court and the jury.” Borruom v. State, supra, at 555, 331 S.W.2d, at 316. See also Middleton v. State, 147 Tex.Cr.R. 146, 179 S.W.2d 510 (1944) (on motion for rehearing); Smith v. State, 15 Tex.App. 338 (1884).
As a result of Article 1223, we had a rule of law which applied with equal force to the State and the defense. This was true because of the well-established rule that where a deadly weapon per se was used by the defendant an intent to kill was presumed. Art. 45, V.A.P.C. (1925); Short v. State, 119 Tex.Cr.R. 34, 45 S.W.2d 587 (1932); Davis v. State, 440 S.W.2d 291 (Tex.Cr.App. 1969).1
Lamentably, the Legislature failed to include in our new Penal Code a provision like Article 1223. I am unable to understand the omission of such an important feature of our prior law, but I am bound to follow the law as enacted by the Legislature.
I reluctantly concur.

. Accordingly, this Court held in Short v. State, supra, a prosecution for assault with intent to murder, that where the defendant shot the complainant with a pistol there was no need to define the phrase deadly weapon.