Castaneda v. State

• Decision Date: 21 September 2000
• Docket Number: No. 08-99-00008-CR,08-99-00008-CR
• Citation: 28 S.W.3d 216
• Parties: (Tex.App.-El paso 2000) CARLOS CASTANEDA, Appellant, v. THE STATE OF TEXAS, Appellee.
• Court: Texas Court of Appeals

Page 216

28 S.W.3d 216 (Tex.App.-El paso 2000)

CARLOS CASTANEDA, Appellant, v. THE STATE OF TEXAS, Appellee.

No. 08-99-00008-CR

COURT OF APPEALS EIGHTH DISTRICT OF TEXAS, EL PASO.

September 21, 2000

Rehearing Overruled October 18, 2000.

Appeal from 41st District Court of El Paso County, Texas (TC# 970D07611) [Copyrighted Material Omitted]

Before Panel No. 1 Larsen, McClure, and Chew, JJ.

O P I N I O N

SUSAN LARSEN, Justice.

Carlos Castaneda appeals his convictions for one count of manslaughter and five counts of aggravated assault. Finding no reversible error, we affirm.

FACTS

In June 1996, Patricia Rose Vasquez lived in an apartment with her older sister, Bernadette Apodaca, Apodaca's six-year-old daughter Cindal, Vasquez's small child, and occasionally with Carlos Castaneda, Apodaca's boyfriend. During this time, Castaneda and Apodaca were estranged, and Castaneda was staying with his mother. On the night of June 8, Vasquez was babysitting Cindal while Apodaca went to a boxing match. Vasquez invited six friends over to drink, talk, and play cards: Karina Hernandez, David Romero, Robert Ramirez, Adrian Rivera, Oscar Alvarado, and Felipe Gonzalez. Around 3 a.m., Castaneda angrily barged into the apartment, looking for Apodaca. When told where she was, Castaneda became angrier, as the boxing match was long over. Castaneda asked Vasquez to page her sister, which she did. Apodaca called and spoke with Castaneda, who yelled at her, accused her of being with another man, and threatened her with physical violence if she did not return home. According to the State's witnesses, Castaneda hung up, threw the phone through a wall, threw furniture around the room, and began pushing Vasquez, her son, and her friends out the door. Castaneda's written statement differed in maintaining that he was pushed and verbally provoked by one of the male visitors. It is uncontroverted that Vasquez, her son, and her guests all left the apartment.

Castaneda followed the group downstairs. After some sort of altercation (characterized in Castaneda's statement as a "pushing match"), Felipe Gonzalez sprayed Castaneda with a key-chain canister containing mace, pepper spray, or tear gas. Castaneda retreated to the apartment, found a rifle he kept there, returned downstairs, and began firing at the group. By this time, everyone except Rivera and Alvarado had gotten into one car, and after hearing shots, the group in the car drove Ramirez to a nearby hospital because they thought he had been hit, leaving Rivera and Alvarado behind. Castaneda continued firing at Rivera and Alvarado and shot Alvarado in the back. Alvarado died of the wound. The autopsy showed bullet entry consistent with being hit in a bent-over, running position. Castaneda returned to the apartment and replaced the rifle. The police arrived shortly thereafter.

Point of Error One: Failure to Disclose Exculpatory Evidence

In his first point of error, Castaneda claims he is entitled to a new trial because the State failed to disclose exculpatory evidence. In order to understand this point, we must fully examine the unique facts surrounding the Brady¹ issue here.

Shortly after the shooting, members of Castaneda's family found a plate in the apartment which had been used for cocaine. Apparently, police officers had not seen the plate or had not understood its significance. The family immediately called Joe Spencer, Castaneda's counsel. Spencer instructed them to take pictures of the plate before moving it, then bag the plate and bring it to him. Spencer called the investigating officers and handed the plate over to them. Police testing was positive for cocaine.

At a pretrial hearing held in March 1998, the prosecutor's position on admissibility of the cocaine plate was:

[T]here's also no evidence to show that the defendants--the witnesses--even knew the cocaine was in the apartment if, in fact, it was found in the apartment, which is still speculative for the fact that it was found and brought forward by the defendant's brother and sister through Mr. Spencer is not relative [sic]. It's not relevant. It's unduly prejudicial and has no probative value in this case.

. . .

There is a picture that there might be something on top of there, but we don't even know if it's a plate full of cocaine. The plate that he has probably wouldn't fit on top of the microwave the way he says it was.

Second of all, we don't know who had access to that apartment after the police officers left. We don't know who has keys. We don't know when these people came in. We don't know what was tampered with or moved around.

We have no definitive evidence as to where that stuff came from if, in fact, it was found in the apartment at all.

. . .

We don't know what it is. For him to say that was definitely it, Your Honor, there is no evidence that these children--these friends--this group of young people were using cocaine and there's definitely no evidence to show that they were the first aggressors.

The trial court granted the State's motion in limine on cocaine use. This was the State's posture until mid-trial: disputing the authenticity of the evidence, impliedly contending that it had been planted by Castaneda's family, and further maintaining that because there was nothing to link it to the victims, it lacked relevance. During the State's case-in-chief, however, this posture suddenly changed. After the jury had been seated and five State's witnesses (including two victim witnesses who had been at the apartment during the altercation), the prosecutor announced:

We're going into the usage of cocaine. They said there were a couple of them that were using the cocaine and I think that was in dispute and any way, I see how it may be relevant to the credibility so we're getting into it, but the thing is we're not waiving its getting into the lab results because there's a problem with the chain and stuff--

The State then called Roberto Ramirez, who had been at the apartment the night Alvarado was killed, and who admitted that he and David Romero had been using cocaine that night. At the time of trial, the State had known for several months that the witness admitted using cocaine on the night of the killing. Castaneda asked for a mistrial based upon prosecutorial misconduct for failing to reveal the witness's admission of cocaine use in a timely manner. He filed a motion for new trial on the same issue.

The due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment places upon the prosecution in a criminal case the affirmative duty to disclose evidence favorable to the accused.² We commonly referred to this as the Brady rule, and to exculpatory evidence as Brady material, in homage to the Supreme Court case enunciating the rule. Favorable evidence includes both that which tends to exculpate the accused, and impeachment evidence,³ because:

Such evidence is 'favorable to the accused,' so that, if disclosed and used effectively, it may make the difference between conviction and acquittal.⁴

Here, the undisclosed evidence had both exculpatory and impeachment value which should have been obvious to the State as soon as a prosecutor learned of it.

The State's position is that nevertheless this presents no reversible error, and indeed no Brady violation, for two independent reasons. First, it urges that because Castaneda and his lawyer knew about the cocaine-tainted plate, and indeed Castaneda's family had found it, the State was under no obligation to disclose Ramirez's admission. This is a situation, the State claims, where the defendant actually knew the facts he claims were not disclosed, and therefore he is not entitled to relief.⁵ Second, the State argues that it disclosed the evidence soon enough that Castaneda was able to use it effectively at trial, and for this reason, no Brady violation occurred.⁶

Initially, we must disagree with the State's characterization of the undisclosed evidence and consequently, we reject its first argument. This was not just evidence of cocaine use of which defendant and his counsel were already aware; this was an admission of illegal drug use by an eyewitness, shortly before a violent event. Ramirez's admission drastically changed the character of the cocaine evidence: before, the defense would have been forced to speculate on who used the drug and how it got into the apartment. Its value as either impeachment or affirmative evidence on self-defense would have been minimal. Moreover, the State went to trial seemingly willing to suggest that Castaneda's family had planted the drug evidence to help his defense. The State was certainly prepared to assert that nothing tied the drug to its witnesses, and the existence of the cocaine was of no relevance to this prosecution. After Ramirez's admission of cocaine use, however, the exculpatory value of this evidence increased dramatically. We therefore disagree that this is a situation where the Brady evidence was already known to the defendant; the evidence in question is not the cocaine-tainted plate, but the admission by Ramirez which Castaneda was completely unaware until well into the State's case-in-chief. We therefore reject the State's first argument and reach its second theory.

We have already determined that Ramirez's admission that he and at least one other person present at the apartment had used cocaine had both impeachment and exculpatory value to Castaneda's defense. Whether evidence is favorable to the accused, however, is only one branch of a three-prong test we use to determine whether reversible Brady error has occurred. A due process violation occurs when a prosecutor: (1) fails to disclose evidence; (2) which is favorable to the accused; (3) that creates a probability sufficient to undermine the confidence in the outcome of the proceeding.⁷ We must therefore next examine the circumstances surrounding failure to disclose, and the materiality of the evidence to the trial.

As to failure to inform the defense, the...