Court Opinion

ID: 9638537
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 15:46:24.974488+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:07.607250
License: Public Domain

CLINTON, Judge,
concurring.
At this point in our treatment of the problem of sufficiency of evidence under V.T.C.A. Penal Code, § 21.02(a) and (b)(3) there is still some confusion that needs to be addressed, particularly since this cause presents a matter of first impression.
The statute provides that sexual intercourse is without consent when, in the order prescribed by it and alleged in the indictment:
(1) the female has not consented; and
(2) the accused knows
(3) the female is physically unable to resist.
The panel opinion found evidence insufficient, partly because it does not exclude *618that at the precise moment of intercourse that the female “was unable to consent.” (Emphasis added) With all deference, inability or incapacity to consent is not an element of the offense pleaded in this cause. The question is whether evidence is sufficient to show that she “has not consented:” that is, she has not “assent[ed] in fact, whether express or apparent,” id., § 1.07(a)(9).
Then the opinion of the Court En Banc points to and sets out appellant’s confession, and concludes that it is “sufficient to prove the deficiencies found by the panel.” Applied precisely, that means that within the confession is ample evidence that the female “was unable to consent,” for that is one of the deficiencies found by the panel. Strictly speaking, it does not mean that evidence is sufficient to affirmatively show she did not “assent in fact” to intercourse, although certain recitations in the confession seem to adequately raise that inference.
I therefore concur in both the reasoning and judgment of the majority opinion, and write only to point out a conceptual uniqueness which distinguishes the provision in issue1 from other rape proscriptions contained in § 21.02(b).

. The requirement of affirmative proof that the female did not “assent in fact” also characterizes subsection (b)(5).