Buxton v. State
| Decision Date | 16 February 1983 |
| Docket Number | No. 63868,63868 |
| Parties | Carlton Arnold BUXTON, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas, Appellee. |
| Court | Texas Court of Criminal Appeals |
Indicted for the offense of aggravated promotion of prostitution, 1 appellant was found guilty of promotion of prostitution 2 by a jury which assessed the maximum punishment allowed for a Class A misdemeanor.
Challenging his conviction, appellant presents two grounds of error which implicate the validity of V.T.C.A. Penal Code, § 43.06(d): "A conviction under this subchapter [A. Prostitution] may be had upon the uncorroborated testimony of a party to the offense." Thus, a recitation of pertinent facts of the matter is not required. Suffice to say that the evidence adduced by the State consisted of testimony from three professed prostitutes that they gave proceeds of their sexual engagements to appellant, and introduction of a photograph of appellant. In short, other than complementing the testimony of each other, there was no independent corroboration of their evidence.
The first ground of error attacks the constitutionality of the statute "in that the enactment of Section 43.06(d)... violated the requisites of Article III, Section 35, of the Constitution of the State of Texas." 3 The caption to Senate Bill 34 reads:
"An Act reforming the penal law; enacting a new penal code setting out general principles, defining offenses, and affixing punishments; making necessary conforming changes to outside law; repealing replaced law; and declaring an emergency."
For a "code" the captional language is adequate to inform its reader that the proposed act "necessarily involves many different kinds of individual provisions" having "logical relationship to the general subject," and it is also "broad enough to put any reasonable caption reader on notice that he will find new matter in the body of the bill," Ex parte Jimenez, 159 Tex. 183, 317 S.W.2d 189, 194 (1958); Beck v. State, 583 S.W.2d 338, 345-346 (Tex.Cr.App.1979). The first ground of error is overruled.
Secondly, appellant contends more or less alternatively that, if § 43.06(d) be upheld and its essence properly included in the charge, a trial court should further admonish the jury with a cautionary instruction against excessive reliance on uncorroborated accomplice testimony, similar to that which a federal judge may give when commenting on the weight of the evidence. Thus he complains that the trial court erred in refusing to include one of his requested charges in that respect. The contention is without merit, so there was no error in not informing the jury of "the nature of accomplice testimony," as requested.
Section 43.06, we are told, was copied from the gambling chapter, for there was nothing like it in the prostitution chapter of the former code. Practice Commentary following § 43.06. See § 47.09, subsection (d) of which is practically a...
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