Carrizales v. State

• Decision Date: 11 December 2013
• Docket Number: No. PD–0320–13.,PD–0320–13.
• Citation: 414 S.W.3d 737
• Parties: Arnold CARRIZALES, Appellant v. The STATE of Texas.
• Court: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

414 S.W.3d 737

Arnold CARRIZALES, Appellant

v.The STATE of Texas.

No. PD–0320–13.

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.

Dec. 11, 2013.

Elizabeth Huddleston, Ikard Wynne LLP, Austin, TX, for Appellant.

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. Gomez had to replace two fairly new tires. The Gomezes didn't think twice about the first couple of flat tires, but as the flats started stacking up—all caused by the identical, distinctive type of screw—they suspected that appellant had scattered the screws on the county road intending to damage their tires as they drove to and from their home. Mrs. Gomez finally called the sheriff's office on February 28, 2010. When Deputy Jennifer Lopez came out to talk to Mrs. Gomez, she, too, got a flat tire caused by identical metal roofing screws in her tire.

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 originof the corpus delicti rule is not known, its history traces back to at least the 17th century in Perry's Case, which refutes “the layman's assertion: ‘he would never have confessed unless he was guilty.’ ” ⁸ In that case, Harrison set off to collect rents but failed to return. Perry, a servant, was sent to search for him, but he too failed to return. Perry was found, and so was Harrison's “hat and comb ‘being hackt and cut, and the band bloody.’ ” ⁹ Perry was a natural suspect, and he soon confessed, implicating not only himself, but his brother and mother in the murder as well. A few years after the three Perrys were executed for this “murder,” Harrison reappeared, very much alive.¹⁰ Thus was born a common-law requirement originally restricted to the case of homicide: “a party accused of homicide ought not to be convicted on his own confession merely, without proof of the finding of the dead body of evidence aliunde that the party alleged to have been murdered is in fact dead.” ¹¹

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 independentevidence of the corpus delicti.¹⁴ Under the common law, the corpus delicti rule “concerns the usability in a criminal case of a confession made by the defendant outside of court.” ¹⁵ The policy of the rule was widely criticized by Dean Wigmore and others,¹⁶ and it did not apply in any other context.

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.¹⁷Jackson 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. Virginia sufficiency standard was adopted, and proof of the corpus delicti in non-confession cases is wholly subsumed by the Jackson elements test....