Keeter v. State

• Decision Date: 06 April 2005
• Docket Number: No. PD-1012-03.,PD-1012-03.
• Citation: 175 S.W.3d 756
• Parties: Jackie Russell KEETER, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas.
• Court: Texas Supreme Court

175 S.W.3d 756

Jackie Russell KEETER, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas.

No. PD-1012-03.

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.

April 6, 2005.

Phil Robertson, Clifton, for appellant.

Jeffrey L. Van Horn, First Assist. St. Atty., Matthew Paul, State's Attorney, Austin, for state.

OPINION

PRICE, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which KELLER, P.J., and WOMACK, KEASLER, HERVEY, and COCHRAN, JJ., joined.

The appellant appealed from the denial of his motion for new trial after a Hamilton County jury convicted him of indecency with a child. He claimed that the trial court erred in denying his Brady¹ claim. The Court of Appeals held that (1) the appellant either preserved his Brady claim or did not need to and (2) the appellant had proved his Brady claim.² We granted review of this case to determine whether the Court of Appeals was correct. We will reverse because the appellant did not preserve his complaint for appellate review.

I. Facts and Procedural History

The appellant was convicted of indecency with a child. The complainant was his wife's daughter from a prior marriage. After being convicted and sentenced, he filed a timely motion for new trial. The text of the motion reads as follows:

The verdict in this cause is contrary to the law and the evidence.

Evidence establishing the defendant's innocence was withheld by a material prosecution witness.

Defendant prays that the Court set aside the judgment of conviction entered in this cause and order a new trial on the merits.

The claim seems to be one of actual innocence. The appellant did not mention Brady.

Along with the motion, the appellant submitted affidavits from the complainant and from Rhonda Taylor King, the complainant's stepmother and the outcry witness at trial. In the complainant's affidavit, she recanted her trial testimony and explained that she had made up the story so that she could live with her father for the summer. In Rhonda's affidavit, she said that, before the trial, she had told the prosecutor that she did not believe the complainant's allegation against the appellant. She also said that the prosecutor told her that he probably would not put Rhonda on the stand as a result. But, the record shows that Rhonda did testify during the trial.

The trial court held a hearing on the motion for new trial. During the hearing, Rhonda testified. She said that she had never believed the complainant's allegation that the appellant had committed the offense. She repeated her claim that, before the trial, she had told the prosecutor that she did not think that the appellant had committed the offense. She explained that she did not believe the complainant because the complainant repeatedly claimed and then denied that the offense happened.

The complainant's father, Travis King, also testified that he had told the prosecutor that he did not believe the complainant's allegation. The appellant's trial attorney testified that the prosecutor never told her that Rhonda and Travis had said that they did not believe the complainant.

The complainant's testimony was consistent with her affidavit recanting her trial testimony. The complainant's mother testified that she had never believed the complainant. A sheriff's office investigator and a Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services investigator also testified about their meeting with the complainant after she recanted her trial testimony.

After the hearing on the motion, the State and the appellant submitted cases that they believed were relevant to the trial court's decision on the motion. Attached to the appellant's letter to the trial court were copies of three opinions that dealt with witness recantations and the effect of the State's knowledge of perjured testimony on a claim of new evidence of innocence.³ The State submitted a letter directing the trial court's attention to several cases, all of which dealt with the credibility of recanting or newly discovered witnesses.⁴ None of the cases submitted by the appellant or the State dealt with Brady claims.

The trial court denied the motion without mentioning a Brady claim. The trial court issued a written order explaining its reasons for denying the motion.

I have finally had a chance to review your submissions of case authority in connection with this motion for new trial. I don't find the testimony that recants the trial testimony to be credible. To do so would require me to believe that this young child made up her testimony because her (younger!!!) sister told her she would have to make something up about the [appellant] so she could get to go and spend the summer with her dad, when she did not previously know her dad was coming and when she had not seen him in two years.

On direct appeal, the appellant complained that the trial court erred in failing to grant the motion for new trial because of (1) a Brady violation and (2) the complainant's recantation. The Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the trial court abused its discretion in denying the motion for new trial because the complainant made a credible recantation.⁵ On discretionary review, we reversed and remanded to the Court of Appeals to consider the appellant's other point of error.⁶

On remand, the Court of Appeals, in a split decision held that the State withheld favorable and material information in violation of Brady.⁷ As a result, the Court of Appeals reversed the conviction a second time. The State filed a motion for rehearing, which was denied. On the State's petition for discretionary review, the Court of Appeals withdrew its prior opinion and issued a new opinion, holding that the appellant either preserved or did not need to preserve his Brady claim for appeal and that the State violated Brady.⁸

We granted the State's petition for discretionary review to determine (1) whether a Brady claim must be preserved, (2) if so, whether the appellant preserved his claim for review, and (3) if preserved whether the Court of Appeals erred in finding that the State violated Brady.⁹

II. Preservation of Error

The State argues that the appellant did not preserve for appellate review his Brady claim because the appellant did not mention Brady in his motion for new trial or during the hearing on the motion. Also, the State points out that the trial court did not mention Brady in its order denying the motion.

The appellant argues that the claim was preserved for review because the Brady allegations were apparent from the motion and from the hearing on the motion. The appellant says that the Brady material was intertwined with the recantation evidence and that the State never objected to the scope of the hearing.

Because of the nature of the appellant's complaint on appeal—that the trial court erred in denying his motion for new trial—he must have raised the Brady complaint at some point during the motion for new trial proceedings to preserve the complaint for appellate review.¹⁰ In this case, the appellant was required to make the trial court and the State aware of his complaint before raising it on appeal: The trial court cannot be said to have erred in denying a motion for new trial on a basis that was not presented to it.

We have said that we should avoid splitting hairs when determining whether a claim has been procedurally defaulted.¹¹ "All a party has to do to avoid the forfeiture of a complaint on appeal is to let the trial judge know what he wants, why he thinks himself entitled to it, and to do so clearly enough for the judge to understand him at a time when the trial court is in a proper position to do something about it."¹² We should consider the context when we determine whether a party has preserved a complaint for appeal.¹³

We recently held in Gallups v. State that the defendant had preserved for review his claim about consent to enter his home, even though he failed to mention Code of Criminal Procedure Article 14.05(1) in his motion to suppress and during the hearing.¹⁴ The defendant had filed a motion to suppress in which he claimed that his arrest violated Article 14.04. We explained that the issue was preserved for review because it had been litigated during the hearing on the motion.¹⁵ More specifically, the facts of that case show that the legal and factual questions about the officer's consent to enter the home and the authority to arrest the defendant in the absence of a warrant were intertwined.

Gallups is distinguishable from the present case because both the factual and legal issues were intertwined and related. In this case, the factual issues may have been intertwined, but the legal issues were not.

The evidence that the appellant claims preserved the Brady issue for review were relevant to the appellant's actual innocence claim. The fact that Rhonda and Travis claimed to tell the prosecutor before trial that they thought that the complainant was lying supported the complainant's recantation because it was some evidence, purportedly existing before the trial, that was consistent with the recantation. The appellant did not mention Brady in his motion or during the hearing on the motion, and did not include any Brady-related cases in his post-hearing submission. And a Brady claim requires that the defendant show by a preponderance of the evidence that evidence was withheld, that it was favorable to the defense, and that the evidence was material.¹⁶

The record supports the conclusion that neither the State nor the trial court understood that the appellant was raising a Brady claim. The prosecutor to whom Rhonda and Travis allegedly spoke to about the complainant's lying was present in the court room and cross-examined the witnesses. He did not admit, deny, or explain the allegation during the hearing on the motion for new trial,¹⁷ even though another prosecutor was present. Had the prosecutor been aware that the appellant was making a Brady claim, he could have testified about it. Also, the trial court's order denying the motion...