Green v. State
Decision Date | 03 October 1979 |
Docket Number | No. 61914,61914 |
Citation | 587 S.W.2d 167 |
Parties | Randy Glenn GREEN, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas, Appellee. |
Court | Texas Court of Criminal Appeals |
This is an appeal from a conviction for the offense of capital murder. The punishment was assessed at death.
Appellant complains of the admission at the punishment stage of testimony concerning an extraneous offense and opinion testimony concerning appellant's character. He also contends that the arguments of counsel at the guilt-innocence stage were improperly presented prior to the reading of the court's charge to the jury, and the prosecutor violated appellant's right to remain silent by commenting on his failure to call certain witnesses.
The evidence, which includes appellant's written confession, establishes that on the night of June 28, 1976, appellant robbed and fatally beat Harold Robinson, the owner of a tavern in Baytown. During the same criminal episode, appellant raped and severely beat a female employee of the tavern.
On November 5, 1976, appellant entered a plea of guilty in the circuit court of Yazoo County, Mississippi, to the offense of the murder of Beverly Clark on July 31, 1976. He was sentenced to imprisonment for life in the Mississippi Department of Corrections.
At the punishment stage of appellant's trial, the State called as a witness William Jennings, a Yazoo County deputy sheriff. Appellant contends that the trial court erred in permitting Jennings to testify as follows:
Prior to this testimony, during voir dire examination of Jennings outside the presence of the jury, the trial court had sustained appellant's objection to the introduction of photographs of Clark's body, but overruled his objection to a verbal description of the body. This earlier objection was substantially the same as the objection voiced during Jennings' testimony before the jury.
While appellant does not question the admissibility of the Mississippi offense, he contends that it was improper to permit the State to show the details of the offense, citing Lege v. State, 501 S.W.2d 880 (Tex.Cr.App.1973) and Mullins v. State, 492 S.W.2d 277 (Tex.Cr.App.1973). These cases involved the application of Art. 37.07, Sec. 3, V.A.C.C.P. Under Art. 37.071(a), V.A.C.C.P., which does apply to capital cases, the trial court is given wide discretion in admitting and excluding evidence at the punishment stage insofar as the relevance of the evidence is concerned. Porter v. State, 578 S.W.2d 742 (Tex.Cr.App.1979). The trial did not abuse its discretion by admitting evidence that appellant had committed a similar murder approximately one month after the charged offense. Wilder v. State, 583 S.W.2d 349 (Tex.Cr.App.1979); Garcia v. State, 581 S.W.2d 168 (Tex.Cr.App.1979); Hammett v. State, 578 S.W.2d 699 (Tex.Cr.App.1979); Gholson v. State, 542 S.W.2d 395 (Tex.Cr.App.1976); Jurek v. Texas, 428 U.S. 262, 96 S.Ct. 2950, 49 L.Ed.2d 929 (1976). It was within the court's discretion to refuse to admit the photographs but to admit the testimony.
Appellant contends that Jennings should not have been permitted to testify because the police reports on which his testimony was based were not made available to the defense, citing Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963). Appellant asserts that these reports would have contained information tending to impeach Jennings' testimony.
At the pretrial hearing on appellant's discovery motion, the trial court refused to order the immediate disclosure of the Mississippi police reports but ordered the State to have the reports available for inspection during the trial should they become material. Appellant expressed his satisfaction with this arrangement. The record reflects that appellant did not subsequently ask to examine and to use for cross-examination the police reports referred to by Jennings during his testimony, and did not object to his testimony on this ground. In the absence of a request by appellant to examine the police reports, constitutional error is presented only if there is a showing that undisclosed evidence exists which creates a reasonable doubt that did not otherwise exist. United States v. Agurs, 427 U.S. 97, 96 S.Ct. 2392, 49 L.Ed.2d 342 (1976); Villarreal v. State, 576 S.W.2d 51 (Tex.Cr.App.1978). Appellant has made no such showing, nor is there any support in the record for his contention that the State suppressed the police reports. This ground of error is overruled.
Following his arrest in Mississippi, appellant was admitted to the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield for observation and testing. Two of the doctors who examined appellant during his six-week stay in the hospital were Donald Guild, Director of Forensic Psychiatry at the hospital, and Charlton Stanley, a staff psychologist. At the punishment stage, Guild and...
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