Standefer v. State
| Decision Date | 31 October 2001 |
| Docket Number | No. 778-99,778-99 |
| Parties | (Tex.Crim.App. 2001) JACK KROHN STANDEFER, Appellant v. THE STATE OF TEXAS |
| Court | Texas Court of Criminal Appeals |
Keller, P.J., delivered the opinion of the Court in which WOMACK, KEASLER, HERVEY and COCHRAN, J.J., joined.
In the present case, the trial court prohibited appellant from asking prospective jurors the following question during voir dire: "Would you presume someone guilty if he or she refused a breath test on their refusal alone?"1 The trial court found that "requesting them [prospective jurors] to make a commitment of that sort would be improper voir dire." The Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the question was a proper attempt "to discover whether any venireperson would have an automatic predisposition to find a person guilty simply because he refused to take the breath test, thereby rendering them unable or unwilling to consider all of the evidence in determining the intoxication issue."2 We granted the State's petition to determine when a voir dire question calls for an improper commitment. We will reverse.
"[A]n attorney cannot attempt to bind or commit a prospective juror to a verdict based on a hypothetical set of facts."3 The rule is easily stated but has not been so easily applied. Nevertheless, while caselaw has not always been clear and consistent, a few common principles are apparent. Commitment questions are those that commit a prospective juror to resolve, or to refrain from resolving, an issue a certain way after learning a particular fact. Often, such questions ask for a "yes" or "no" answer, in which one or both of the possible answers commits the jury to resolving an issue a certain way. For example, the following question seeks to elicit a commitment from jurors to convict a person of a drug offense if that person is found with a residue amount of cocaine in a crack pipe: "If the evidence, in a hypothetical case, showed that a person was arrested and they had a crack pipe in their pocket, and they had a residue amount in it, and it could be measured, and it could be seen, is there anyone who could not convict a person, based on that."4 A commitment question can also be a question that asks a prospective juror to refrain from resolving an issue on the basis of a fact that might be used to resolve the issue. For example, a question may attempt to secure a commitment to refrain from resolving the punishment issues in a capital case on the basis of victim impact evidence:
Let us assume that you are considering in the penalty phase of any capital murder case, okay? And some of the evidence that has come in shows that the victim's family was greatly impacted and terribly grieved and greatly harmed by the facts....Can you assure us that the knowledge of those facts would not prevent you or substantially impair you in considering a life sentence in such a case?5
This is not a proper question.
In addition, although commitment questions are generally phrased to elicit a "yes" or "no" answer, an open-ended question can be a commitment question if the question asks the prospective juror to set the hypothetical parameters for his decision-making.6 An example of an open-ended commitment question is: "What circumstances in your opinion warrant the imposition of the death penalty?"7 To summarize, then, a question is a commitment question if one or more of the possible answers is that the prospective juror would resolve or refrain from resolving an issue in the case on the basis of one or more facts contained in the question.
Of course, many questions in voir dire are not commitment questions and are not covered by this opinion. For example, the question, "[I]f the victim is a nun, could [the prospective juror] be fair and impartial?" does not ask the prospective juror to resolve or refrain from resolving any issue.8 A juror could be "fair" and still take into account the victim's status as a nun where that status is logically relevant to the issues at trial or fail to do so if the juror perceived that the victim's status as a nun should not be controlling. If, however, the defendant had asked, "Could you consider probation in a case where the victim is a nun?"9 then he would indeed have asked a commitment question. In that situation, the juror is asked to say whether he would refrain from resolving an issue in the case (probation) based upon a fact in the case (the victim is a nun). And as that example illustrates, the word "consider" does not prevent a question from being a commitment question. To the contrary, the word "consider" often marks a commitment question in which the prospective juror is asked to refrain from resolving an issue after learning a fact that could be used to resolve that issue.
We have not always recognized these distinctions. In Maddux v. State, we held that defense counsel could properly ask whether a prospective juror could consider probation in a murder case in which a child had died.10 We contended that our holding was required by our earlier holding in Nunfio v. State, 808 S.W.2d 482 (Tex.Crim.App. 1991). 11 What we failed to appreciate, however, was that the question in Nunfio was distinct from the question in Maddux for the reasons we have just discussed in this opinion.12 Because Maddux was wrongly decided and produces inconsistency in our precedent, we overrule that decision, along with any other decision that is inconsistent with the principles articulated in this opinion.13
Whether a question is a commitment question resolves only half the problem we confront today. Not all commitment questions are improper. For example, questions concerning a juror's ability to consider the full range of punishment for a particular offense meet the above definition of commitment questions but are nevertheless proper.14 The question, "Can you consider probation in a murder case?" commits a prospective juror to keeping the punishment options open (i.e., to refraining from resolving the punishment issues in a certain way) in a murder case. A murder conviction, even in the abstract, necessarily comprises some factual elements: those listed in the statute (e.g. causing the death of an individual). But jurors are required to follow the law enacted by the Legislature. So a prospective juror must be able to consider the full range of punishment provided for an offense or be challengeable for cause.15
The distinguishing factor is that the law requires jurors to make certain types of commitments. When the law requires a certain type of commitment from jurors, the attorneys may ask the prospective jurors whether they can follow the law in that regard.16
However, where the law does not require the commitment, a commitment question is invariably improper. For example, a prospective juror is not challengeable for cause simply because he does not consider a particular type of evidence to be mitigating.17 And whether a juror considers a particular type of evidence to be mitigating is not a proper area of inquiry.18 In the mitigating evidence context, the linkage between these two concepts -- challenges for cause and the propriety of asking questions -- was recognized in Raby, but can be understood from examining other mitigating evidence cases in which the proposed question was found to be improper.19 None of the questions in these cases could have rendered a prospective juror challengeable for cause because jurors are not required to give mitigating effect to any of those factors. Likewise, victim impact evidence is a legitimate factor for a jury to consider in deciding whether to impose a life sentence instead of the death penalty (i.e. in answering the mitigation special issue), and a prospective juror cannot be asked whether such evidence would affect his resolution of that issue.20 And the State cannot require a prospective juror to commit to the proposition that potential rehabilitation is irrelevant to a determination of future dangerousness; rehabilitation is in fact a proper consideration under that special issue.21 Of course, a juror is not required to consider rehabilitation as evidence relating to future dangerousness, but he is allowed to do so, and the State cannot attempt to secure a commitment on whether he will do so. We conclude that, for a commitment question to be proper, one of the possible answers to that question must give rise to a valid challenge for cause.22
Even if a question meets this challenge for cause requirement, however, the question may nevertheless be improper if it includes facts in addition to those necessary to establish a challenge for cause. For example, in Atkins, the prosecutor asked prospective jurors if they could convict a person who was arrested while possessing, in his pocket, a crack pipe containing a residual amount of cocaine.23 The State could have permissibly questioned the prospective jurors about their ability to follow a law that holds a person guilty of possession even though the possession involves only a residue amount of the drug in question.24 But the State's question supplied facts beyond what was necessary to sustain a challenge for cause (arrest, possession of a crack pipe, item found in the defendant's pocket).25 These additional facts rendered improper what otherwise would have been a proper question designed to assess whether a prospective juror was challengeable for cause. To be proper, then, a commitment question must contain only those facts necessary to test whether a...
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