In Amador v. State, the Texas Criminal Appeals Court heard a case where the appellant pled guilty to indecent exposure and was sentenced to 120 days confinement. Subsequently, the State indicted him for two counts of the third degree felony of indecency with a child...
Texas Rule of Evidence 702 governs the admissibility of expert witness testimony. That rule states: If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified...
An appeals case out of Eastland entitled Steadman v. State involved Fifth Amendment concerns. Allowing the officer to testify that the defendant neither admitted nor denied allegations against him was not a Fifth Amendment rights violation. Also, it was not improper...
The Court of Fort Worth in Reed v. State, heard a case on appeal where the State's reasonable suspicion to stop the defendant for DWI based, in part, on the time of day and an area of the city that the defendant was coming from. "Here the [officer] not only testified...
In Ex Parte Dangelo, a case out of the Fort Worth Court of Appeals, the defendant had a Fifth Amendment right not to answer proposed polygraph examination questions about whether, since being on probation, he had sexual contact with minors. The question asked about...
Ex parte Napper was a case out of the Texas Criminal Appeals court where the applicant for Habeas Corpus was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and aggravated kidnapping. Some of the evidence supporting the convictions involved DNA testing conducted by the...
In Winfrey v. State, the Texas Criminal Appeals Court reversed and rendered an acquittal on the defendant convicted of murder. The appellant was charged with capital murder, but convicted by a jury of the lesser-included offense of murder and assessed a 75 year...
In Campbell v. State, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed a conviction of possession of cocaine in an amount of 4 grams or more, but less than 200 grams. The jury found 2 enhancement paragraphs true and assessed punishment at 99 years in prison. The court...
In Spence v. State, the Court of Criminal Appeals heard a case where the defendant was convicted of possession with intent to deliver cocaine that a police officer found during a pat-down search for weapons after he stopped him for traffic violations, one of which was...
There are two decisions from the United States Supreme Court which suggest that a confession may be inadmissible if it is tainted by the illegal investigation arising from an illegal arrest. Many more have evolved since the United States Wong Sun case back in 1963....
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