Lead Opinion
OPINION
delivered the opinion of the Court,
On appeal, James Garza contested the imposition of his life-without-parole sentence arguing that, because he was a juvenile, the sentence violated his Eighth Amendment rights as defined by the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama. The Fourth Court of Appeals refused to review his claim and held that, by failing to lodge an objection in the trial court, Garza has forfeited this claim on appeal. We reverse the court of appeals’ decision because it conflicts with this Court’s subsequently delivered opinion in Ex parte Maxwell.
In November 2011, a jury convicted James Garza of capital murder for his involvement in the stabbing death of the complainant for the purpose of stealing the complainant’s car. The State waived the death penalty because Garza was a juvenile at the time of the capital murder.
In a single issue on appeal, Garza claimed that his life-without-parole sentence violated the Eight Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment because his status as a juvenile bars the punishment imposed. Garza cited the United States Supreme Court’s 2012 opinion in Miller v. Alabama
Garza asserts that the court of appeals erred by deciding the procedural-default issue under general preservation-of-error principles without considering whether Garza’s claim must be preserved in light of our opinion in Marin v. State.
• The first category of rights are those that are “widely considered so fundamental to the proper functioning of our adjudicatory process ... that they cannot be forfeited ... by inaction alone.”6 These are considered “absolute rights.”7
• The second category of rights is comprised of rights that are “not forfeita-ble” — they cannot be surrendered by mere inaction, but are “waivable” if the waiver is affirmatively, plainly, freely, and intelligently made.8 The trial judge has an independent duty to implement these rights absent any request unless there is an effective express waiver.9
• Finally, the third category of rights are “forfeitable” and must be requested by the litigant.10 Many rights of the criminal defendant, including some constitutional rights, are in this category and can be forfeited by inaction.11
Rule 33.1’s preservation requirements do not apply to rights falling within the first two categories.
In Maxwell, a majority of the Court— over two dissenting opinions joined by a total of four judges — held that the rule announced in Miller was a new substantive rule, as opposed to a procedural rule, and therefore applied retroactively.
While this case presents a question of error preservation on appeal and not in a collateral proceeding, the preservation requirement overlaps substantially, and the requirement in each context informs the other.
Generally, all of the reasons that support the need for a matter to have been raised at trial when the matter is relied upon in direct appeal apply equally or more forcefully when a matter is relied upon in postconviction habeas corpus. Most likely, then, if a matter is one that could be relied upon on appeal only if the defendant called it to the attention of the trial judge in a timely manner and requested appropriate relief, similar action will be held necessary to “preserve” the matter for consideration on habeas corpus.
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The nature of collateral attack, moreover, suggests that even a more stringent standard than is applied on direct appeal might at least sometimes be appropriate in the habeas corpus context.24
Like the result of forfeiture by inaction in the trial court, this Court will not review the merits of a habeas corpus claim if an applicant had the opportunity to raise the issue on appeal.
Writ should not be used in matters that should have been raised on appeal.”
However, by reaching the merits of Maxwell’s claim, the Maxwell majority held, perforce, that Maxwell’s Miller claim was not subject to procedural default. This implied holding was a condition precedent to granting relief; it was a threshold through which the Court allowed Maxwell’s claim to pass. Without it, the Court could not entertain the merits of Maxwell’s claim consistent with our established case law, much less grant relief on it. Maxwell ’s result decided the issue before us today: substantive status-based or individualized-sentencing claims under the Eighth Amendment and embraced by Miller are not forfeited by inaction. We therefore may not conclude today that Garza’s Miller claim is forfeited on appeal without an objection at trial and at the same time adhere to the Court’s opinion in Maxwell. Failing to consider Maxwell’s effect on the instant case denies Maxwell the force of precedent deserving of an opinion that received the support from a majority of the Court. Until such time as the United States Supreme Court calls this Court’s characterization of the Miller rule
We do find limits on Maxwell’s, implied holding, though. In granting Maxwell habeas corpus relief, the Maxwell majority did not purport to discern whether his Miller claim fell within Marin’s “absolute prohibitions” or “waiver-only” category. It was sufficient for the majority opinion to hold that Maxwell’s claim was simply not forfeited. Likewise, this case does not require that we further define where in Marin ’s categorical structure a Miller claim is properly placed. We reserve such a decision for a matter that properly presents the issue. Maxwell sufficiently addressed the propriety of the court of appeals’ holding we are called upon to review.
Accordingly, we hold that Garza’s claim was not forfeited by his failure to urge his claim in the trial court. The court of appeals’ judgment is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Notes
. Appellant’s Br. 4.
. — U.S.—,
. Garza v. State, No. 04-11-00891-CR,
.
. Tex.R.App. Pro. 33.1(a) (requiring that, as a prerequisite to presenting a complaint on appeal, the record show a complaint was made to the trial court alleging specific grounds for the objection that comply with the Rules of Evidence and that the trial court ruled, or refused to rule on, the objection.).
. Marin,
. Id. at 279.
. Id. at 279-80.
. Id.
. Id.
. Id. at 279.
. See id. at 279-80.
. Fuller v. State,
. Garza,
. Ex parte Maxwell,
. Id. at 73-76.
. Id. at 75 (emphasis in original).
. Id.
. See id. at 67-68. ("We ordered that this application be filed and set to decide if Miller v. Alabama applies retroactively to a claim raised in a post-conviction proceeding, and, if so, what remedy is appropriate.”).
. Id. at 68.
. Id. at 76.
. See generally Ex parte Crispen,
. See, e.g, Ex parte Jimenez,
. 43B Dix & Schmolesky at § 59:7.
. Ex parte Webb,
. E.g., Jimenez,
. Ex parte Banks,
. Ex parte Richardson,
Concurrence Opinion
filed a concurring opinion in which WOMACK, J., joined.
I join the Court’s opinion without reluctance or hesitation — but then, I was among the majority in Ex parte Maxwell.
I.
In the context of direct appeals, we have declared it to be a “systemic” requirement that courts of appeals address every potential issue of procedural default that might arise on direct appeal, at least before it may grant appellate relief.
II.
And with good reason. In Maxwell, we canvassed the various jurisdictions that have addressed the question of the retro-activity of the Supreme Court’s holding in Miller and then opted to join those that have held it to be, indeed, fully retroactive. To that end, we concluded that Miller announced a substantive limitation upon a state’s ability to impose a certain punishment upon a certain class of offender; or, put another way, we deemed Miller’s rule to be “categorical because it completely removes a particular punishment from the list of punishments that can be constitutionally imposed, that of mandatory life without parole.”
.
. — U.S.—,
. Although Maxwell failed to raise his Miller claim at the trial court level,
. E.g., Lackey v. State,
. E.g., Haley v. State,
. Tex.Code Crim. Proc. art. 11.07.
. E.g., Ex parte Reed, 111 S.W.3d 698, 754 (Tex.Crim.App.2008) (Price, J., concurring).
. Maxwell,
. See
Concurrence Opinion
filed a concurring opinion in which ALCALA, J., joined.
I agree with the majority that James Garza is entitled to relief under Miller v. Alabama
In Furman v. Georgia,
The Supreme Court held, in Griffith v. Kentucky,
the [Griffith ] Court criticized as arbitrary the practice of “simply fishing one case from the stream of appellant review, using it as a vehicle for pronouncing new constitutional standards, and then permitting a stream of similar cases subsequently to flow by unaffected by the new rule.” The Court also criticized limited prospectivity as inequitable, violating “the principle of treating similarly situated defendants the same.” Consequently, the Supreme Court held that a newly announced constitutional rule for conducting criminal prosecutions must be applied retroactively to all cases, state or federal, pending on direct review or not yet final when the rule was announced.7
This limited retroactivity principle is at the heart of Teague: Limited retroactivity must be given as a matter of course to new constitutional rules announced by the United States Supreme Court.
The Griffith defendants preserved error at trial via objections, but Garza is entitled to relief under the Griffith retroactivity rule even though his Eighth Amendment claim was not preserved at trial. Why? Because it wasn’t the law at the time of trial. We do not expect attorneys to be clairvoyant and foresee new constitutional rules before they are announced in assessing their performance.
The Supreme Court, like this Court, excuses procedural default in such cases because to not do so would be manifestly unjust. The logic is laid out in Reed v. Ross:
[T]he failure of counsel to raise a constitutional issue reasonably unknown to him is one situation in which the [cause] requirement is met. If counsel has no*267 reasonable basis upon which to formulate a constitutional question ... it is safe to assume that he is sufficiently unaware of the question’s latent existence that we cannot attribute to him strategic motives of any sort.... Accordingly, we hold that where a constitutional claim is so novel that its legal basis is not reasonably available to counsel, a defendant has cause for his failure to raise the claim in accordance with applicable state procedures.17
Appellant would be entitled to relief under Miller even if we had not held, in Ex parte Maxwell, that Miller was fully retroactive as a Teague exception. And if -new constitutional rules subject to limited retroactivity under Teague — like Apprendi and Gaudin — apply to cases pending on direct appeal regardless of whether there was an objection at trial, surely new substantive constitutional rules subject to full retroac-tivity under a Teague exception — like Miller, Graham, Kennedy, Roper, Atkins and Thompson
As we noted in Ex parte Maxwell, these “categorical ban” cases striking down sentencing practices based on mismatches between the culpability of a class of offenders and the severity of a penalty turn on status (juvenile, mental retarded individual) or crime (non-homicide). They are not dependant upon a trial objection for the same reason that they are fully retroactive:
This significant risk explains why courts, including this one, uniformly review claims based on new substantive constitutional rules that have been “forfeited” or procedurally defaulted in some manner.
Courts that have addressed the effect of Miller v. Alabama, on cases tried before Miller, but not yet final, have consistently rejected claims that the Miller issue was forfeited by a failure to object at trial. In People v. Gutierrez,
We have said that the failure to object on Eighth Amendment grounds at trial forfeits review of the claim on appeal.
With these remarks, I respectfully concur in the Court’s judgment.
. 567 U.S. —,
.
. See Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Death Row Facts, http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/ death_row_dr/facts.html ("When capital punishment was declared 'cruel and unusual punishment’ by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 1972, there were 45 men on death row in Texas and 7 in county jails with a death sentence. All of the sentences were commuted to life sentences by the Governor of Texas, and death row was clear by March 1973.”); see, e.g., Curry v. State,
. Furman,
.
.
. Id. at 678 (citations omitted).
. Teague v. Lane,
. Id. (‘'[T]he 'failure to apply a newly declared constitutional rule to criminal cases pending on direct review violates basic norms of constitutional adjudication.’ ”) (quoting Griffith,
. Taylor,
. See Ex parte Chandler,
. Apprendi v. New Jersey,
. United States v. Gaudin,
. United States v. Cotton,
.
.
. Id. at 15-16,
. Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S.—,
. Ex parte Maxwell,
. Ex parte Blue,
. Atkins v. Virginia,
. See Ex parte Briseno,
. Tex.Code Crim. Proc. art. 11.071, § 5(a)(1).
.
. Id. at 431,
.
. Id. at *5,
. Commonwealth v. Brown,
. People v. Banks, — P.3d—,—,- —,
. Curry v. State,
Concurrence Opinion
filed a concurring opinion
I conclude that James Garza, appellant, whose claim reaches this Court on direct appeal, did not forfeit his complaint by failing to object at trial on the basis of a constitutional rule that had not yet been established at the time of his trial. Although it reaches the same conclusion, the majority opinion does so through an alternative analysis that I believe is unnecessary for resolving this appeal and that appears to suggest that the preservation-of-error requirements applicable on direct appeal are identical to those required for obtaining habeas corpus relief, a principle that I disagree has been definitively established. I, therefore, concur only in this Court’s judgment.
I. Miller v. Alabama’s New Constitutional Rule Applies to Direct-Appeal Cases
Appellant’s trial began in November 2011; his motion for new trial was filed in December 2011; and the Supreme Court decided Miller v. Alabama in June 2012, while this case remained pending on direct appeal. See Miller v. Alabama, — U.S. —,
Because the present case is on direct appeal, this Court must apply the constitutional ruling in Miller to this case. The record shows that, during the trial proceedings, the parties represented to the jury and court that appellant was seventeen years of age at the time of the offense. The Supreme Court has observed that the “failure to apply a newly declared
Ordinarily, a defendant waives a complaint that had not been preserved at trial based on an alleged violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments. See Rhoades v. State,
Taking these principles in mind, I would hold that, because the constitutional rule at issue had not been established at the time of appellant’s trial, his counsel’s failure to object did not forfeit his complaint on that basis. Furthermore, because this case is on direct appeal, appellant is entitled to the benefit of the new rule of constitutional law.
II. Conclusion
I respectfully concur only in this Court’s judgment.
Dissenting Opinion
filed a dissenting opinion.
We should dismiss appellant’s petition as improvidently granted because the record does not contain a judicial finding that appellant is a juvenile and the record does not otherwise conclusively show that to be the case. I also write to express my disagreement with the Court’s holding that a rule of law can be established by our complete failure to address an issue in a prior case. And even if a rule of law could be established in such a manner, I do not agree that we would be constrained to follow it in a subsequent case.
1. Proof of Appellant’s Age
In Miller, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause prohibited the automatic imposition of a life without parole sentence on someone who was a juvenile at the time he committed the offense.
From the record references supplied by the State, it is apparent that appellant did give conflicting statements about his age, that he had no identification, that he gave a fake name, and that he did not give information about his parents when asked. A co-conspirator told officers that appellant was actually seventeen years old, and when confronted with that statement, appellant stated that he was seventeen. The record also shows that Colorado authorities treated appellant as a juvenile after that point. Nevertheless, the evidence is conflicting, I see no judicial finding in the record that appellant was actually under age eighteen at the time he committed the offense, and appellant has not directed us to any such finding.
Under these circumstances, the direct-appeal record is not sufficient to show that appellant is entitled to relief under Miller, which applies only to individuals who are under age eighteen. A remand in this case would be useless because the court of appeals has already determined that the record does not conclusively establish appellant’s age. Moreover, there is no pressing jurisprudential need to review the court of appeals’s unpublished opinion in this case. There is a forum in which appellant’s claim and any associated issues can be resolved: habeas corpus. The court of appeals noted the State’s accurate suggestion that “Garza’s issue might be more appropriately raised in a writ of ha-beas corpus, which would allow Garza the opportunity to more fully develop the record with regard to his age.”
2. Implied Holdings
In Ex parte Maxwell, we held that the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller applied retroactively to cases on collateral review.
It is true, as the Court says, that we should have addressed the issue of procedural default before remanding the case
3. Binding Precedent
But even if one considered Maxwell’s failure to address the issue of procedural default to be a silent holding, the question remains whether this Court should follow that holding in subsequent cases or whether this Court should, in essence, overrule that holding at the earliest opportunity.
Of course, when a decision is flawed because of a failure to supply supporting authority or reasoning, the ultimate con-elusion of that decision may nevertheless be correct.
4. Right Not Recognized
Judge Cochran’s concurring opinion advances the idea that the appellant’s claim is immune from procedural default because it was not recognized as a valid claim at the time of trial. In support of this claim, the opinion relies upon, and intermingles, four distinct doctrines that are, in turn, separate from the Texas rule of procedural default. In doing so, the concurrence jumbles up the concepts of error preservation and retroactivity.
First, the concurrence relies upon the doctrine, articulated in Griffith v. Kentucky,
Judge Cochran’s concurrence next relies upon the doctrine articulated in Teague v. Lane
Judge Cochran’s opinion also relies upon the “plain error doctrine” that is followed by federal courts in deciding to review some errors on direct appeal in the federal system that were not raised at trial. But Texas does not adhere to the plain error doctrine; we apply the three-category approach articulated in Marin v. State.
Finally, Judge Cochran’s concurring opinion relies upon Reed v. Ross,
In addition to relying upon doctrines not directly applicable to the case at hand to support this “right not recognized” approach, Judge Cochran’s opinion contends that our jurisprudence in Marin recognizes “the same rule: The contemporaneous objection rule does not apply to fundamental constitutional rights — Marin category-one rights — that were not recognized at the time of trial.” In support of this statement, the opinion cites Sanchez v. State.
5. Disposition
I would dismiss the petition as improvidently granted because appellant’s status as a juvenile at the time of the offense has not been established. We need not, and should not, address a complex issue of procedural default at this juncture. If this Court nevertheless feels compelled to address the procedural-default issue, it ought to conduct a serious analysis of the merits rather than rely upon our failure to address the issue in Maxwell.
I respectfully dissent.
. — U.S. —, —,
. Garza v. State, No. 04-11-00891-CR, slip op. at 2,
. Id. at2n. 1.
. Garza, No. 04-11-00891-CR, slip op. at 4 n. 3.
. See Ex parte Brown,
.
. See id., passim.
. See id. at 76 (remanding for further sentencing proceedings "to permit the factfinder to assess applicant’s sentence at (1) life with the possibility of parole (as both pre-2005 and post-2013 Texas law permits) or (2) life without parole after consideration of applicant’s individual conduct, circumstances, and character”); Gipson v. State,
. See Ex parte Lewis,
. See Ex parte Ramey,
. See Dixon v. State,
. See VanNortrick v. State,
. Justice Scalia has forcefully argued that it is desirable to overrule bad precedent at the earliest opportunity:
[T]he respect accorded prior decisions increases, rather than decreases, with their antiquity, as the society adjusts itself to their existence, and the surrounding law becomes premised upon their validity. The freshness of error not only deprives it of the respect to which long-established practice is entitled, but also counsels that the opportunity of correction be seized at once, before state and federal laws and practices have been adjusted to embody it.
South Carolina v. Gathers,490 U.S. 805 , 824,109 S.Ct. 2207 ,104 L.Ed.2d 876 (Scalia, J„ dissenting). The case Justice Scalia wanted*273 tó overrule, Booth v. Maryland,482 U.S. 496 ,107 S.Ct. 2529 ,96 L.Ed.2d 440 (1987), was ultimately overruled by Payne v. Tennessee,501 U.S. 808 ,111 S.Ct. 2597 ,115 L.Ed.2d 720 (1991).
. Grey v. State,
. Fienen v. State,
. Grey,
. Lewis,
. Bawcom v. State,
. Leday v. State,
. See Mosley v. State,
. See id. (analyzing the grand-jury issue that was previously decided adversely to the defendant in Rousseau). See also id.,
.
. Davis v. United States, — U.S. —,
. See Henderson v. United States, —— U.S. —,
. Henderson,
.
. Lambrix v. Singletary,
. Id. at 525,
.
. Henderson,
.
. Smith v. Murray,
.
. See Marin,
. Sanchez,
. Id. at 367.
