Johnson v. State

• Court: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
• Citation: Johnson v. State, 423 S.W.3d 385 (Tex. Crim. App. 2014)
• Decision Date: 26 February 2014
• Docket Number: No. PD–0193–13.,PD–0193–13.
• Parties: Manley DeWayne JOHNSON, Appellant v. The STATE of Texas.

423 S.W.3d 385

Manley DeWayne JOHNSON, Appellant

v.The STATE of Texas.

No. PD–0193–13.

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.

Feb. 26, 2014.

Bridget Holloway, Assistant District Attorney, Houston, TX, for Appellant.

Jani J. Maselli Wood, Harris County Public Defender's Office, Houston, Lisa C. McMinn, State's Attorney, Austin, TX, for The State.

OPINION

HERVEY, delivered the opinion of the unanimous Court.

Appellant, Manley Johnson, was charged with, and convicted of, aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. Tex. Penal Code § 29.03(a)(1). The judgment ordered him “to pay all fines, court costs, and restitution as indicated above.” The amount of $234 was written in the blank on the judgment labeled “Court Costs.” We granted the State's petition for discretionary review to determine whether the court of appeals erred in deleting the specific amount of $234 in court costs from the trial-court judgment.¹ After careful considerationof the granted grounds, and to afford future litigants a “roadmap” to questions regarding court costs, we hold that (1) a claim with respect to the basis of court costs need not be preserved at trial to be raised for the first time on appeal, (2) Appellant's claim is ripe for review, (3) a record on appeal can be supplemented with a bill of costs, (4) the document in the supplemental clerk's record is a bill of costs, (5) the court of appeals erred when it failed to consider the supplemental bill of costs, (6) a bill of costs need not be in the record to support a particular amount of court costs, and (7) the fact that most court costs (and certainly those discussed in this case) are mandated by statute and, thus, subject to the old adage that “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” ² dispenses with the need for an ordinary sufficiency review. As a result, we will modify the judgment of the court of appeals and reinstate the judgment of the trial court.

The court of appeals

After Appellant was assessed court costs at trial, he appealed that assessment. On appeal, he argued that there was insufficient record evidence to support the $234 listed in the written judgment. Johnson v. State, 389 S.W.3d 513, 515 (Tex.App.-Houston [14th Dist.] 2012). Appellant argued that the record contained no bill of costs or other evidence supporting the $234 amount. The court of appeals ordered the district clerk to supplement the record with a bill of costs, if one existed, or an affidavit stating that one did not exist. The clerk filed an affidavit stating that a bill of costs was not included in the record. Later, the clerk's office filed a supplemental clerk's record including a document that appeared to be a bill of costs. The court of appeals concluded that the document was not a bill of costs and that “there is no indication that this printout was ever brought to the attention of the trial judge.” Id. at 515 n. 1 (citing Chambers v. State, 149 Tex.Crim. 400, 194 S.W.2d 774, 775 (Tex.Crim.App.1946); Lamb v. State, 931 S.W.2d 611, 613 (Tex.App.-Amarillo 1996, pet. ref'd)). After declining to consider the document in the supplemental record, the court agreed with Appellant that, because “[i]t is undisputed that the record in the trial court at the time this appeal was filed did not contain any evidence supporting the assessment of $234 in court costs[,]” the trial court erred when it entered a specific amount of court costs to be paid by Appellant. Id. at 516. We granted review.

Discussion

The Texas Code of Criminal Procedure requires that a judgment order a defendant to pay court costs. Tex.Code Crim. Proc. arts. 42.15 (applicable when the punishment is only a fine), and 42.16 (applicable when the punishment is something other than a fine). Court costs listed in a certified bill of costs need neither be orally pronounced nor incorporated by reference in the judgment to be effective. See Armstrong v. State, 340 S.W.3d 759, 766–67 (Tex.Crim.App.2011) (citing Weir v. State, 278 S.W.3d 364, 367 (Tex.Crim.App.2009)); Tex.Code Crim. Proc. art. 103.001 (stating when court costs in a criminal case are payable (i.e., collectible)). However, when a specific amount of court costs is written in the judgment, an appellate court errs when it deletes the specific amount if there is a basis for the cost. Only statutorily authorized court costs may be assessed against a criminal defendant,³ and all costs assessed against a defendant can be separated into two categories: (1) mandatory costs and (2) discretionary costs. CompareTex.Code Crim. Proc. arts. 102.001–.022 (a non-exhaustive list of various court costs a trial judge must impose if the certain conditions precedent are met), withTex.Code Crim. art 26.05(g) (requiring a court to determine whether a criminal defendant “has financial resources that enable him to offset in part or in whole the costs of the legal services provided....”). A mandatory cost is one other than attorney's fees that is a predetermined, legislatively mandated obligation imposed upon conviction. Because mandatory costs are fixed by statutes that are published publicly in the laws of the State of Texas, a criminal defendant has constructive notice of those laws, and courts should take judicial notice of those laws. See Watts v. State, 99 S.W.3d 604, 610 (Tex.Crim.App.2003) (“Texas courts can, of course, take judicial notice of the laws of this State.”); Legg v. State, 594 S.W.2d 429, 432 (Tex.Crim.App. [Panel Op.] 1980); see also Fuller v. Oregon, 417 U.S. 40, 50 n. 11, 94 S.Ct. 2116, 40 L.Ed.2d 642 (1974) (noting that, with respect to the imposition of court costs, “recoupment statutes, including a schedule of fees, were published in the Oregon Revised Statutes at the time of the petitioner's plea ...”).

We have stated that a claim challenging the basis of assessed court costs “differs somewhat from a claim of insufficient evidence of guilt....” Mayer v. State, 309 S.W.3d 552, 556 (Tex.Crim.App.2010). This is because an evidentiary-sufficiency analysis is derived from due-process principles and requires that a trial record contain sufficient evidentiary proof of a defendant's guilt before a criminal conviction will be sustained. Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 316, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979) (“[N]o 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.”). After Jackson, this Court began to employ an evidentiary-sufficiency review in other contexts. See Moreno v. State, 415 S.W.3d 284, 288 (Tex.Crim.App.2013) (probable-cause affidavits); McCain v. State, 22 S.W.3d 497 (Tex.Crim.App.2000) (affirmative deadly-weapon findings); Coble v. State, 330 S.W.3d 253, 265 (Tex.Crim.App.2010) (future-dangerousness special issue). The common thread among these analyses is that each relates directly or indirectly to a defendant's guilt or sentence. However, court costs are not part of the guilt or sentence of a criminal defendant, nor must they be proven at trial; rather, they are “a nonpunitive recoupment of the costs of judicial resources expended in connection with the trial of the case.” SeeArmstrong, 340 S.W.3d at 767 (quoting Weir, 278 S.W.3d at 366–67). As a result, we review the assessment of court costs on appeal to determine if there is a basis for the cost, not to determine if there was sufficient evidence offered at trial to prove each cost, and traditional Jackson evidentiary-sufficiency principles do not apply.

A. A challenge to the bases of assessed court costs need not be preserved to be raised on appeal for the first time, and Appellant's claim is ripe for review.

We first address the State's threshold argument that Appellant failed to preserve his complaint for review. The State argues that this Court's opinion in Mayer v. State, 309 S.W.3d 552 (Tex.Crim.App.2010), in which this Court held that an objection is not required to raise such a claim, is distinguishable because that case dealt with the imposition of discretionary attorney's fees, while this case deals with the imposition of mandatory, statutorily imposed costs. Appellant disagrees and argues that the court of appeals correctly relied on this Court's decision in Mayer for the proposition that an argument challenging the bases of the assessed court costs can be brought for the first time on appeal. After reviewing the arguments of the parties and the authorities cited therein, we conclude that a criminal defendant need not preserve an objection in the trial court to raise a claim challenging the bases for the imposition of court costs for the first time on appeal.

In Mayer, the appellant challenged the imposition of attorney's fees. Specifically, he claimed that there was no basis in the record to support the trial court's determination that the appellant had financial resources and, as a result, the ability to pay at least a portion of the cost of his defense. Mayer, 309 S.W.3d at 552;seeTex.Code Crim. Proc. art. 26.05(g) (requiring a judicial determination of whether a defendant has the financial resources to offset in whole, or part, the costs of the legal services provided to the defendant). We first addressed the State's argument that the appellant procedurally defaulted his attorney's-fees claim because he failed to object to the imposition to the fees in the trial court, and we concluded that the appellant did not have to object at trial to raise his claim for the first time on appeal. See Mayer, 309 S.W.3d at 556. As we noted previously, while a traditional guilt-sufficiency analysis does differ from a claim challenging the bases of assessed mandatory court costs or attorney's fees in that the former relates to the defendant's guilt or sentence and the latter does not, the appellant's claim in Mayer and Appellant's claim in this case are similar—they both brought claims challenging the imposition of costs.

There is nothing in this...