Arnold CARRIZALES, Appellant v. The STATE of Texas.
No. PD-0320-13.
Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.
Dec. 11, 2013.
420 S.W.3d 737
COCHRAN, J.
Benavides-Maddox‘s testimony, on the other hand, is not similarly deficient. She testified that she used a billing system to keep track of her time in the case and that she had billed, and been paid, $25,000 for her work up to trial. She further testified that her contract with the Montanos provided for payment at her $200 hourly rate. Finally, she testified that she arrived early each day of trial and continued to work after the jury was dismissed preparing for the next day. She estimated that she worked about twelve hours per day during the course of the five-day trial. While similar to Gonzalez‘s estimation that he worked the case an average of six hours a week during his four-year involvement, it is also different in significant respects.
The billing inquiry here involves contemporaneous events and discrete tasks—the trial and associated preparation for each succeeding day. Moreover, it is a task the opponent witnessed at least in part, having also participated in the trial. Despite this knowledge, Benavides-Maddox‘s charges relating to the trial were not questioned on cross-examination. Unlike Gonzalez‘s testimony, Benavides-Maddox‘s testimony about her unbilled trial work is some evidence on which to base an award of attorney‘s fees because it concerns contemporaneous or immediately completed work for which she had not had time to bill, or presumably even record, in her billing system. The court of appeals accordingly did not err in affirming the award attributable to her fees.
The court of appeals, however, did err in affirming the part of the award attributable to Gonzalez‘s claimed fee of $339,000. Accordingly, pursuant to
John R. Messinger, Assistant State Prosecuting Attorney, Austin, TX, Lisa C. McMinn, State‘s Attorney, Austin, for the State.
OPINION
COCHRAN, J., delivered the opinion of the unanimous Court.
Appellant was convicted of the Class B misdemeanor of criminal mischief for “throwing screws and nails into the road causing flat tires.” On direct appeal he argued that the evidence was insufficient to establish the corpus delicti of the offense of criminal mischief, i.e., that the damage to the tires was the result of criminal activity. The court of appeals disagreed—stating that proof of appellant‘s motive and the physical evidence combined “allowed a rational fact finder in this case to conclude that the State had established the corpus delicti of criminal mischief.”1 We granted review to clarify that the common-law corpus-delicti rule exists, in the post Jackson v. Virginia2 era, only in confession cases. Because the circumstantial evidence was sufficient under Jackson v. Virginia to prove that appellant committed the crime of criminal mischief, we affirm.
I.
The evidence at the bench trial showed that appellant lives on a quiet county road. His cousin, Ramona Gomez, lives a little farther down that county road, on a private drive. At the very end of the road is an operating oil well. Both appellant and Mrs. Gomez testified that, in late 2009 and early 2010, no one else lived off that road. The only other vehicles on the county road were the eighteen-wheelers “going up and down from the oil well.”
Mrs. Gomez and her husband had to drive past appellant‘s property to go anywhere. Appellant wanted the Gomezes to stop speeding on the county road, so, in 2009, he put some large tree stumps on the road, beyond his residence but before the Gomezes‘s private drive, “[t]o slow them down[.]” Mrs. Gomez testified that when she confronted appellant about the stumps, “He said maybe he did or maybe he didn‘t [put them there], because we were driving too fast down the road, and that we needed to slow down.”
Later, Mrs. Gomez tried to invite appellant to her husband‘s birthday party, but he rebuffed the invitation, telling her she should not be on his property. At some point, Mrs. Gomez stopped letting her children go play on appellant‘s property. Then, in late 2009 and early 2010, she and her husband started getting flat tires—all caused by the same distinctive type of metal roofing screw.3 Her husband got screws in all four of his already-worn tires, and he had to replace all four tires. Mrs.
Bee County Sheriff‘s Office Investigator Steve Linam talked to appellant twice about the problem, and each time he denied putting the screws in the road.4 Investigator Linam said he did not search appellant‘s property, and he did not drive far down the county road, for fear of getting a flat tire also: “I drove out to the location. I looked in the immediate area [past] his driveway. I didn‘t see any [roofing screws], but I did not go all the way down the road because I didn‘t want to end up with flats on my car.”
At trial, appellant denied scattering screws on the county road, but he admitted placing the tree stumps in the road. He said that the screws must have gotten on the county road “accidently.”
The trial judge found appellant guilty of the charged offense and sentenced him to thirty days in jail, suspended for one year. On direct appeal, appellant argued that the evidence was insufficient to prove that the screws ended up in Mrs. Gomez‘s tires because of anyone‘s intentional or knowing act, much less his own.5 But the court of appeals held that the evidence established both (1) the corpus delicti of the offense of criminal mischief, and (2) appellant‘s identity as the person who committed the crime.6 We granted appellant‘s petition, which attacks only the first holding—that the evidence was sufficient to prove the corpus delicti of the offense.
II.
The corpus delicti rule is a common law, judicially created, doctrine—the purpose of which was to ensure that a person would not be convicted based solely on his own false confession to a crime that never occurred.7 Although the exact ori-
In discussing the rule requiring corroboration of a defendant‘s extrajudicial confession, Dean Wigmore explained the meaning of the term corpus delicti. He noted that proof of guilt for a criminal offense may be divided conceptually into three parts:
first, the occurrence of the special kind of injury or loss (as, in homicide, a person deceased; in arson, a house burnt; in larceny, property missing); secondly, somebody‘s criminality as the source of the loss,—these two together involving the commission of a crime by somebody; and, thirdly, the accused‘s identity as the doer of this crime.12
The first two parts—the occurrence of the injury or loss, and its causation by criminal conduct—were termed the corpus delicti. The third element, the identity of the accused as the offender, was not considered part of the corpus delicti because he, of course, had already confessed to the crime.13 The sufficiency of the evidence corroborating the defendant‘s extrajudicial confession was assessed by determining whether the State had offered some inde-
The old corpus-delicti “usability” rule has, however, been superceded by the due-process “sufficiency of the evidence” model set out in Jackson v. Virginia.17 Jackson is the only constitutional standard of review for assessing the legal sufficiency of evidence in a criminal case.18 Under that standard, we view the evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict and determine whether any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt.19 It is not necessary that the evidence directly proves the defendant‘s guilt; circumstantial evidence is as probative as direct evidence in establishing the guilt of the actor, and circumstantial evidence alone may be sufficient to establish guilt.20 The Jackson standard was established to give appellate teeth to the due-process right established in In re Winship: “no person shall be made to suffer the onus of a criminal conviction except upon sufficient proof—defined as evidence necessary to convince a trier of fact beyond a reasonable doubt of the existence of every element of the offense.”21
The application of the corpus-delicti rule as it applies to convictions based on extrajudicial confessions has survived the Jackson v. Virginia due-process sufficiency review in Texas.22 As we stated earlier this year,
When the burden of proof is “beyond a reasonable doubt,” a defendant‘s extrajudicial confession does not constitute legally sufficient evidence of guilt absent independent evidence of the corpus delicti. The corpus delicti doctrine requires that evidence independent of a defendant‘s extrajudicial confession show that the “essential nature” of the charged crime was committed by someone.23
Appellant notes that we have occasionally applied the corpus delicti rule in cases that did not involve extrajudicial confessions.24 In Bussey v. State,25 we relied upon an earlier case, Zepeda v. State,26 in holding that the State failed to establish the corpus delicti of the offense of arson—that is, the fact that the fire (the loss) was “of incendiary origin” (was the result of somebody‘s criminality). But, in Bussey, we apparently did not notice that Zepeda‘s conviction relied on the defendant‘s extrajudicial confession, and thus we properly applied the corpus-delicti rule requiring corroboration of that confession.27 It appears that we mistakenly applied the corpus-delicti rule in Bussey, a case that did not involve an extrajudicial confession, and we thereby confused the bench and bar.
At any rate, Bussey was decided several years before the Jackson v. Virgi-
III.
A person commits criminal mischief if, without the effective consent of the owner he intentionally or knowingly damages or destroys the tangible property of the owner.29 The court of appeals emphasized four pieces of evidence in holding that the State proved that appellant intentionally or knowingly damaged or destroyed the Gomezes’ tires:
- Appellant admitted that he had an ongoing conflict with the Gomezes over the speed at which they drove past his house on the county road.
- Appellant admitted that he had placed logs in the roadway in an attempt to slow the Gomezes down, but that the logs had not curbed their speeding.
- Mrs. Gomez stated that she had lived off the county road for some 30 years, and had never, until this dispute arose with appellant, encountered hazards on the road.
- The patrol officer who went to the Gomezes’ home to take the initial report ended up with a flat tire caused by the same type of roofing screws that caused the flat tires on the Gomezes‘s vehicles.30
Appellant acknowledges this circumstantial evidence as proof of both identity and that “the officer and Gomez drove on the same roads and that there were screws on that road,” but says the evidence does not support an inference that criminality was the source of the loss, as opposed to accident.31 He complains that the court “improperly conflated identity with corpus delicti.... [T]here was no appropriate reason for the court of appeals to include identity evidence in the corpus-delicti analysis.”32 Au contraire. The court of appeals, charged with deciding whether the evidence was legally sufficient, was entitled to consider the logical force of all the circumstantial evidence as it pertained to each element of criminal mischief—including criminal intent. And we agree with the State that the Gomezes,
It is not every day that one gets a flat tire; it is more uncommon that the flat tires keep coming; and it is more uncommon still that they are all caused by the same distinctive and specialized roofing screw. Mrs. Gomez, Mr. Gomez, and Deputy Lopez all had their tires punctured by multiple identical roofing screws over a period of months—making it likely that they got them on the stretch of the county road beyond appellant‘s house but before the Gomezes‘s house, or on their private road. Even appellant agreed that the only other traffic on any part of that stretch of road were the eighteen-wheelers driving to the well at the end of the county road—oil trucks with no known reason to be carrying metal roofing screws. And, perhaps most importantly, appellant admitted that he put logs in that very same stretch of road only months before to intentionally create an obstruction for the Gomezes and make them slow down. This prior act of putting obstructions in the road with the intent to harm the Gomezes was strong circumstantial evidence rebutting the “accident” theory.
In Drager v. State,35 for example, the defendant was prosecuted for criminal mischief for intentionally driving a tractor into a barn. At trial, the defendant admitted damaging the tractor, but claimed that the collision was an accident; he testified that he saw the tractor going down the road without a driver; that he was being a good neighbor by trying to stop it.36 We held that the jury did not have to believe the defendant‘s “accident” explanation, and his admission that he was on probation for damaging a different tractor was a circumstance showing his intent to damage.37 As
Notes
In speaking with Mr. Carrizales, he denied throwing screws in the roadway and said that he never did that. He said he doesn‘t like the people that live [past] him down the road, and then he called me again the following day, and this time he got irate and he said he was going to call the big boss and get me in trouble for investigating him, and he says he doesn‘t do things like this, and [then] he again said that he doesn‘t like the people that live up at the end of the road [past] him.
Id. at 142.The corpus-delicti rule is that no criminal conviction can be based upon the defendant‘s extrajudicial confession or admission, although otherwise admissible, unless there is other evidence tending to establish the corpus delicti.
Id. Dean Wigmore noted that such a rule might be merely superfluous, but “this rule, and all such rules, are to-day constantly resorted to by unscrupulous counsel as mere verbal formulas with which to entrap the trial judge into an error of words in his charge to the jury.” Id.No one doubts that the warning which [the corpus delicti rule] conveys is a proper one; but it is a warning which can be given with equal efficacy by counsel or ... by the judge in his charge on the facts. Common intelligence and caution, in the jurors’ minds, will sufficiently appreciate it, without a laying on of the rod in the shape of a rule of law. Moreover, the danger which it is supposed to guard against is greatly exaggerated in common thought. That danger lies wholly in a false confession of guilt. Such confessions, however, so far as handed down to us in the annals of our courts have been exceedingly rare.
Id. (citations omitted).The rule has been criticized for inadequately serving its admittedly “limited function.” It exists to detect false confessions but does so in only one circumstance: when a person confesses to an imaginary crime. It does nothing to protect a person who confesses to a crime committed by someone else. Courts have questioned the logic of that distinction. The rule has also been criticized as outdated. Since its inception, the United States Supreme Court has recognized additional constitutional and procedural safeguards concerning the voluntariness of confessions that have led some courts to question whether the rule is obsolete. Additionally, since courts first began applying the corpus delicti rule, criminal statutes have become more numerous and complex, making the corpus delicti difficult, if not impossible, to define for certain crimes.