Hyland v. State, NUMBER 13-16-00596-CR
| Decision Date | 05 April 2018 |
| Docket Number | NUMBER 13-16-00596-CR |
| Parties | RICHARD HYLAND, Appellant, v. THE STATE OF TEXAS, Appellee. |
| Court | Texas Court of Appeals |
On appeal from the 319th District Court of Nueces County, Texas.
Before Justices Rodriguez, Longoria, and Hinojosa
By four issues, Richard Hyland appeals his conviction for the intoxication manslaughter of his wife, Jamie Doherty.1 Hyland challenges the sufficiency of the evidence to support his conviction, as well as the jury's finding that he used or exhibiteda deadly weapon—his motorcycle—during the commission of the offense. Hyland also disputes the validity of the warrant used to draw and test his blood for intoxicants. We reverse and remand.
In his third issue, Hyland asserts that the warrant authorizing his blood draw was defective. Hyland focuses on Officer Raymond Harrison's affidavit, which was submitted to a magistrate in pursuit of the warrant. According to Hyland, the affidavit contained reckless or deliberate falsehoods that, when excised from the affidavit, render the affidavit insufficient to provide probable cause to believe that he was intoxicated. Hyland contends that because the defective warrant violated his Fourth Amendment rights, the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress all resulting blood evidence.
We look to the four corners of the affidavit in determining the existence of probable cause to search the identified locations. Massey v. State, 933 S.W.2d 141, 148 (Tex. Crim. App. 1996).
To obtain the warrant, Officer Harrison filled out a standard form and submitted it to a magistrate as a sworn affidavit. The preprinted affidavit form contained several allegations concerning the suspect's intoxication offense and the officer's probable cause to believe that a blood draw would lead to evidence of the intoxication offense. Throughout the form were blanks for the affiant to enter details concerning the case facts. For instance, the introductory paragraphs were preprinted and provided only a blank for the affiant's name and term of service with the Corpus Christi Police Department (nineyears). The stock language then averred that the affiant's police training "has included detection and recognition of persons who are intoxicated."
The body of the affidavit form included nine numbered paragraphs. Officer Harrison entered Hyland's personal information in paragraph one, which described Hyland for all purposes as "the suspect." In preprinted paragraphs two and three, the affidavit stated that the suspect was in custody and was concealing human blood, which constituted evidence of the offense described in paragraph four. Paragraph four asserted that the suspect had operated a motor vehicle in a public place while intoxicated, leaving blanks for the date and time of the offense, which Officer Hyland entered as May 30, 2014, at 10:50 p.m. Paragraph four also recited the statutory definition of intoxication. See TEX. PENAL CODE ANN. § 49.01(2) (West, Westlaw through 2017 1st C.S.). In paragraph five, Officer Harrison checked a box indicating his belief that the suspect was operating a motor vehicle in a public place, which was "based on . . . a witness"; he entered the contact information of two witnesses, Juan and Phyllis Ledesma, in an accompanying blank.
Paragraphs six through nine described the basis of Officer Harrison's belief that Hyland was intoxicated, which we reproduce below, with Officer Harrison's hand-written notations in the underlined blanks:
Upon review of Officer Harrison's affidavit, the magistrate signed the warrant at 1:19 a.m. Before the introduction of the blood evidence, Hyland moved to exclude the results of the blood draw, alleging that paragraphs six, seven, and nine all contained reckless or deliberate falsehoods that rendered the affidavit defective. The trial court held a Franks hearing to determine the truth or falsity of the contested statements.2 See Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154, 156 (1978).
As to paragraph six of the affidavit, Hyland argued that Officer Harrison never actually smelled the "strong" odor of alcohol on his breath. Officer Harrison testified at the Franks hearing that when he arrived at the scene of the motorcycle accident, Hyland was already being loaded into the ambulance. Harrison agreed that he did not mention that he smelled alcohol on Hyland in his investigative report; instead, Officer Harrison's report only mentioned that a paramedic told him that Hyland smelled of alcohol.
However, Officer Harrison testified that he had in fact smelled alcohol on Hyland's breath. According to Officer Harrison, he followed the ambulance to the hospital, where he saw Hyland unconscious in a hospital bed. He approached within one or two feet of Hyland's face and smelled a strong odor of alcohol. He then read a statutory warning and drew up his affidavit. Based on Officer Harrison's testimony, the trial court denied Hyland's challenge to paragraph six.
Hyland next asserted that Officer Harrison never asked him to perform field sobriety tests, as alleged in paragraph seven, and never requested a sample of Hyland's "breath and/or blood, which the suspect refused to provide," as alleged in paragraph nine. Hyland pointed out that he was in a coma when Officer Harrison approached him.
Officer Harrison agreed. He testified that paragraphs seven and nine were preprinted in the affidavit form, and though he knew the content of the affidavit, it did not occur to him to cross out inapplicable paragraphs. Officer Harrison testified that in thehundreds of blood warrants he had handled in the past, crossing out this stock language had never been an issue, and he did not intend to mislead the magistrate by leaving this preprinted content in his affidavit. Instead, as the State pointed out, Officer Harrison made a handwritten notation in paragraph eight that "suspect is in coma at Spohn Memorial Hospital."
Based on Officer Harrison's testimony, the trial court sustained Hyland's Franks motion and excised the entirety of paragraph seven from the affidavit, concerning Hyland's performance on field sobriety tests. The trial court also excised the final sentence of paragraph nine, which concerned Hyland's refusal to provide a breath or blood sample.
However, the trial court found that even after excluding those statements, the redacted affidavit nonetheless stated a sufficient basis of probable cause to believe that a search of Hyland's veins would yield evidence of a crime. The trial court overruled Hyland's motion to suppress the blood evidence.
Ordinarily, the constitutional preference for searches based upon warrants requires reviewing courts to give "great deference" to a magistrate's determination of probable cause. State v. Le, 463 S.W.3d 872, 876 (Tex. Crim. App. 2015). But that deference is not called for when a Franks motion is sustained. Id. at 877. Under Franks v. Delaware, if the defendant satisfies the court by a preponderance of the evidence that a false statement was included in the warrant affidavit intentionally or with reckless disregard for the truth, the affidavit's false material must be set to one side. 438 U.S. at156. If, after excising the tainted material, the affidavit's remaining content is insufficient to establish probable cause, the search warrant must be voided and the fruits of the search excluded to the same extent as if probable cause was lacking on the face of the affidavit. Id.
Where a Franks motion has been sustained, we afford no deference to the magistrate's decision to issue a warrant, in part because a "magistrate's judgment would have been based on facts that are no longer on the table," and there is "no way of telling the extent to which the excised portion influenced the magistrate judge's determination." Le, 463 S.W.3d at 877. More importantly, it reinforces the principle that "[a] search warrant may not be procured lawfully by the use of illegally obtained information." Id.
In such situations, the question becomes whether, putting aside all tainted allegations, the independently acquired and lawful information stated in the affidavit nevertheless "clearly" established probable cause. McClintock v. State, 444 S.W.3d 15, 19 (Tex. Crim. App. 2014) (quoting Castillo v. State, 818 S.W.2d 803, 805 (Tex. Crim. App. 1991) (en banc)). A search warrant based in part on tainted information is nonetheless valid if it clearly could have been issued on the basis of the untainted information in the affidavit. Le, 463 S.W.3d at 877.
We read the purged affidavit in a commonsense manner, drawing reasonable inferences from the information to determine whether probable cause is established. Id.; se...
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