Morris v. State

• Decision Date: 18 November 2009
• Docket Number: No. PD-0240-07.,PD-0240-07.
• Parties: Reginald Eugene MORRIS, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas.
• Court: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

301 S.W.3d 281

Reginald Eugene MORRIS, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas.

No. PD-0240-07.

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.

November 18, 2009.

Rehearing Denied February 3, 2010.

[301 S.W.3d 282]

Stanley G. Schneider, Houston, TX, for appellant.

Gail Kikawa McConnell, Asst. Dist. Atty., Conroe, TX, Jeffrey L. VanHorn, State's Attorney, Austin, TX, for State.

OPINION

COCHRAN, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which WOMACK, JOHNSON, KEASLER, HERVEY, and HOLCOMB, JJ., joined.

Appellant's high-speed boat collided with a cabin cruiser on Lake Conroe, killing two adults and a baby. A jury convicted appellant of three counts of intoxication manslaughter. The court of appeals found that the competency jury's verdict that appellant, who claimed amnesia concerning the boat accident, was competent to stand trial was not against the great weight and preponderance of the evidence.¹ We granted both appellant's and the State's petitions for discretionary review to 1) revisit Jackson v. State, a prior opinion addressing the relevance of amnesia to a claim of incompetency, and 2) address the appropriate remedy for an unlawful, partially stacked sentence.² We affirm the court of appeals.

I.

A. The accident.

On July 17, 1999, appellant and Gary Carlin spent the day drinking and boating on Lake Conroe in appellant's 23-foot Wellcraft speedboat. Douglas Cox, who was also out boating that day, ran into appellant at a lakeside bar in the late afternoon. Later, they drove their boats over to the Del Lago Marina to continue drinking. Sometime after 9:00 p.m., the three men walked down to the boat dock. As Cox drove his boat off, he glanced back and saw a bright spotlight coming from appellant's Wellcraft, shining up at the marina hotel.

Brian Ross also saw the spotlight. Ross recognized the Wellcraft because he had worked on it before. He said that the light was being held by the driver who was the taller and thinner of the two men on the boat.³ Ross said that the driver yelled out that they were "just looking for some pussy." The driver revved the engine, idled out of the marina, and then the boat "took off at a very high RPM, very fast, what I would consider fast throttle."

Tim Treemer, who was fishing on the lakeshore, said that he could hear a boat traveling from Del Lago to the main body of the lake "at a high rate of speed ... over 70 miles an hour." Treemer noted the boat did not have its aft lights up. He told his fishing partners, "he's going to hit somebody or kill somebody." Treemer lost sight of the boat, but he shortly heard a violent collision—fiberglass on fiberglass. Treemer called 911.

Dennis Norman, who was fishing from his 28-foot pontoon boat, likewise heard the accident:

First thing I noticed before the accident was, I heard what I would call a speed boat, jet boat, or whatever start up its motor; and it was in a distance, but we could tell that it was—it was running pretty fast. It sounded like it was wide open. It was so wide open for what, from 30 seconds to a minute; and then we heard some kind of a crash, collision.

The Wellcraft had run into the hull of the "Julie V," Fred Hart's 30-foot Bayliner cabin cruiser. There were six people on the Bayliner—Hart; his wife Julia; Julia's daughter, Jewel; Jewel's boyfriend, Kenneth; Julia's other daughter, Lonnie; and Lonnie's baby son, Joseph. Julia had seen the Wellcraft just before impact, and Fred saw it "coming toward us from about 2:00 o'clock. A no-miss angle."

Dennis Norman, who arrived within minutes, said the first thing he saw was "two boats sitting in the water. One boat was turned one way and the other boat was jammed into the side of it. I saw people in the water. I saw mass confusion. There was just a ton of people in the water." Dennis tied his pontoon boat up next to the Julie V and "started pulling passengers in." The "cigarette boat was sinking," so his brother crossed to that boat to bring those two people in.

Appellant was unconscious, with the side of his face stuck in the windshield just to the left of the steering wheel. Carlin was behind him, asking for help to get appellant off the boat. Appellant regained consciousness and was belligerent. The Norman brothers "had to manhandle him" to get him to the pontoon boat. He "was obviously drunk. His face was real messed up." Carlin, who was in better shape, helped move appellant. The Wellcraft sank less than five minutes later.

When the Vessel Assist arrived, the injured were moved to that boat. Dennis Norman said appellant was again uncooperative.

When I stood him up, I wrapped my arms around him and stood him up; and I said, "[W]e've already unloaded everybody onto the Vessel Assist. They need to get to the hospital." And he was not cooperative. He says, "give me a second, man." I said, "[W]e don't have a second. We have people here dying on the other boat." And he said, "[J]ust chill." When he told me just to chill, I lost it, and I wrapped my arms around him, threw him into the other boat....

Carlin was able to get on the Vessel Assist on his own, but then unsuccessfully tried to commandeer the boat in an effort to flee the scene. Jewel died of a "skull fracture, crushed chest and asphyxia due to drowning." Trapped in the cabin by the Wellcraft, Lonnie, who sustained a lacerated spleen and liver, and the baby, who sustained a skull fracture, died from their injuries and asphyxia due to drowning.

Appellant was transported to the Conroe Regional Medical Center emergency room, where he was listed in critical condition. The attending nurse said he was "very bloody and screaming and was upset— well, highly upset and he was in pain. And I remember him telling me that he had his f____ing teeth in his hand and I took those from him out of his hand and put them in a jar for him and he was just extremely upset." Both the nurse and doctor noted that appellant smelled very strongly of alcohol. Appellant said "he wasn't f____ing driving" multiple times. He told a trooper that a woman had been driving the Wellcraft, and she had jumped overboard. Appellant had facial injuries, a broken jaw, multiple missing teeth, a lacerated lower lip, multiple contusions across his chest, a ruptured lung and a closed head injury. He had a BAC of .198 at 11:00 p.m. and .180 at midnight.

Carlin was also taken to the E.R. He had a cut brow and eyelid, cuts to his abdomen and leg, and a lacerated liver. He repeatedly stated that appellant had been driving the boat.

B. The trial and appeal.

After a competency jury had determined that appellant was competent to stand trial, a separate jury was chosen for the trial on the merits. The two contested issues at trial were whether appellant was intoxicated at the time of the collision, and whether appellant or Gary Carlin was piloting the boat when it struck the cabin cruiser. Midway through the trial, the parties agreed and stipulated to following fact: "As a result of the injuries sustained during the incident on July 17, 1999, Reginald Eugene Morris has no memory of the events of that day after leaving Del Lago." Evidence that appellant had been at the wheel included the following:

(1) Appellant's civil deposition testimony that the Wellcraft was his and that he would not have let Carlin drive it in the dark;

(2) Brian Ross's testimony that the Wellcraft left Del Lago shortly before the accident with the taller and thinner of the two occupants (appellant) driving;

(3) The Norman brothers' testimony that appellant was found unconscious near the Wellcraft's steering wheel;

(4) The E.R. doctor's testimony that appellant's injuries were consistent with having hit the steering wheel, while Carlin's were not;

(5) Testimony that some of appellant's teeth were found under the driver's seat of the Wellcraft, directly under the steering wheel; and

(6) The State's reconstruction expert's opinion that appellant was driving the boat.

The State's evidence that appellant was intoxicated included appellant's admission that he was "a little drunk," eyewitness testimony that he was "obviously" drunk, and BAC tests putting him at nearly twice over the then-legal limit.

Evidence that supported the defense theory that Carlin had been behind the wheel included the following:

(1) The defense reconstruction expert's opinion that Carlin was in the driver's seat (2) Appellant's prior statement that he had made a conscious decision not to drive the boat that night because he had had too much to drink;

(3) Testimony that appellant was shirtless at Del Lago (coupled with Ross's testimony that the driver had a T-shirt on);

(4) Insurance adjuster Amy Pinkerton's deposition testimony that Carlin said "He had been driving a boat on Lake Conroe that had been in an accident and killed a family or killed some people.";⁴

(5) Tarmar Clement's testimony that Carlin told her, "I didn't see the lights before I hit the boat."; and

(6) Testimony that Carlin had attempted to take over the Vessel Assist boat and drive it away from the scene of the accident.

The defense noted that much of appellant's apparently drunken behavior was consistent with that of someone with a head injury. It also vehemently challenged the State's blood-alcohol evidence. Ultimately the jury credited the State's witnesses, convicted appellant on all three manslaughter counts, and assessed his sentence at 18 years on each count. The trial judge stacked the first two sentences and 12 years of the third, achieving a 48-year sentence. The judge stated, "The Record should be very clear, in the event there is a challenge as to whether I can do what I'm doing, if I can't it's consecutive for 54 years."

In affirming the conviction and reforming the sentence, the court of appeals held the following: (1) the competency jury was entitled to credit the State's experts' opinions that appellant was competent, and its verdict was not against the great weight and preponderance of the evidence in light of that testimony; (2) the...