the State of Texas v. Larry Lanier Lausch, 651 S.W.3d 546

Larry Lausch was tried for two counts of indecency with a child; a jury convicted him on both counts.
During trial the Hitchcock PD had lost or deleted investigatory video and interview recordings; the defense sought a spoliation instruction but the trial court denied it.
When the court clerk stapled the written jury charge, an excerpt from Green v. State (an appellate opinion about spoliation) was inadvertently attached to the charge for Count 2 and delivered to the jury.
After verdict the judge polled jurors; post-verdict juror testimony was inconsistent but one juror (Juror 8) testified the excerpt affected his deliberations.
The trial court granted Lausch’s motion for new trial based on the attached appellate excerpt; the State appealed and this court affirmed the new-trial order.

Issue	State's Argument	Lausch's Argument	Held
Whether attaching an appellate opinion excerpt to the jury charge constituted error (judicial comment on the law/weight of evidence).	No reversible error: the excerpt merely stated accurate law and did not add new evidence.	Attaching an opinion excerpt to the charge amounted to a judicial comment and improperly guided/bolstered the jury against his spoliation-based defensive theory.	Error existed: the excerpt was a prohibited judicial comment and should not have been in the written charge.
Whether any such error caused reversible harm (Almanza/Reeves "some harm" standard, preserved objection).	Any influence was harmless; jurors still had to find elements beyond a reasonable doubt and Juror 8 only said deliberations were affected, not the verdict.	The excerpt undermined Lausch’s core defensive theory about lost evidence and at least one juror said it affected deliberations, satisfying the lower "some harm" threshold.	The court concluded the error caused "some" actual (non-hypothetical) harm to Lausch and affirmed the trial court's grant of a new trial.

Watts v. State, 99 S.W.3d 604 (Tex. Crim. App. 2003) (trial court may not give judicial comments or include appellate-excerpt law in jury charge)
Reeves v. State, 420 S.W.3d 812 (Tex. Crim. App. 2013) (explaining preserved-charge error requires showing "some harm")
Ambrose v. State, 487 S.W.3d 587 (Tex. Crim. App. 2016) (Almanza framework and review of mixed questions of law and fact)
French v. State, 563 S.W.3d 228 (Tex. Crim. App. 2018) (factors for harm analysis under Almanza)
Ngo v. State, 175 S.W.3d 738 (Tex. Crim. App. 2005) (two-step jury-charge error review)
Almanza v. State, 686 S.W.2d 157 (Tex. Crim. App. 1984) (standard for reviewing jury-charge error and harm)
Green v. State, 607 S.W.3d 147 (Tex. App.—Houston [14th Dist.] 2020) (discussed spoliation instruction standards; excerpt mistakenly attached to charge)
Arizona v. Youngblood, 488 U.S. 51 (1988) (no due-process violation absent bad faith in failure to preserve evidence)