OPINION
COCHRAN, J.,
delivered the opinion of the unanimous Court.
Appellant was convicted of the Class B misdemeanor of criminal mischief for “throwing screws and nails into the road causing flat tires.” On direct appeal he argued that the evidence was insufficient to establish the
corpus delicti
of the offense of criminal mischief,
i.e.,
that the damage to the tires was the result of criminal activity. The court of appeals disagreed-stating that proof of appellant’s motive and the physical evidence combined “allowed a rational fact finder in this case to conclude that the State had established the
corpus delicti
of criminal mischief.”
We granted review to clarify that the common-law
corpus-delicti
rule exists, in the post
Jackson v. Virginia
era, only in confession cases. Because the circumstantial evidence was sufficient under
Jackson v. Virginia
to prove that appellant committed the crime of criminal mischief, we affirm.
I.
The evidence at the bench trial showed that appellant lives on a quiet county road. His cousin, Ramona Gomez, lives a little farther down that county road, on a private drive. At the very end of the road is an operating oil well. Both appellant and Mrs. Gomez testified that, in late 2009 and early 2010, no one else lived off that road. The only other vehicles on the county road were the eighteen-wheelers “going up and down from the oil well.”
Mrs. Gomez and her husband had to drive past appellant’s property to go anywhere. Appellant wanted the Gomezes to stop speeding on the county road, so, in 2009, he put some large tree stumps on the road, beyond his residence but before the Gomezes’s private drive, “[t]o slow them down[.]” Mrs. Gomez testified that when she confronted appellant about the stumps, “He said maybe he did or maybe he didn’t [put them there], because we were driving too fast down the road, and that we needed to slow down.”
Later, Mrs. Gomez tried to invite appellant to her husband’s birthday party, but he rebuffed the invitation, telling her she should not be on his property. At some point, Mrs. Gomez stopped letting her children go play on appellant’s property. Then, in late 2009 and early 2010, she and her husband started getting flat tires-all caused by the same distinctive type of metal roofing screw.
Her husband got screws in all four of his already-worn tires, and he had to replace all four tires. Mrs.
Gomez had to replace two fairly new tires. The Gomezes didn’t think twice about the first couple of flat tires, but as the flats started stacking up — all caused by the identical, distinctive type of screw — they suspected that appellant had scattered the screws on the county road intending to damage their tires as they drove to and from their home. Mrs. Gomez finally called the sheriffs office on February 28, 2010. When Deputy Jennifer Lopez came out to talk to Mrs. Gomez, she, too, got a flat tire caused by identical metal roofing screws in her tire.
Bee County Sheriffs Office Investigator Steve Linam talked to appellant twice about the problem, and each time he denied putting the screws in the road.
Investigator Linam said he did not search appellant’s property, and he did not drive far down the county road, for fear of getting a flat tire also: “I drove out to the location. I looked in the immediate area [past] his driveway. I didn’t see any [roofing screws], but I did not go all the way down the road because I didn’t want to end up with flats on my car.”
At trial, appellant denied scattering screws on the county road, but he admitted placing the tree stumps in the road. He said that the screws must have gotten on the county road “accidently.”
The trial judge found appellant guilty of the charged offense and sentenced him to thirty days in jail, suspended for one year. On direct appeal, appellant argued that the evidence was insufficient to prove that the screws ended up in Mrs. Gomez’s tires because of
anyone’s
intentional or knowing act, much less his own.
But the court of appeals held that the evidence established both (1) the
corpus delicti
of the offense of criminal mischief, ,and (2) appellant’s identity as the person who committed the crime.
We granted appellant’s petition, which attacks only the first holding — that the evidence was sufficient to prove the
corpus delicti
of the offense.
II.
The
corpus delicti
rule is a common law, judicially created, doctrine — the purpose of which was to ensure that a person would not be convicted based solely on his own false confession to a crime that never occurred.
Although the exact ori
gin of the
corpus delicti
rule is not known, its history traces back to at least the 17th century in
Perry’s Case,
which refutes “the layman’s assertion: ‘he would never have confessed unless he was guilty.’ ”
In that case, Harrison set off to collect rents but failed to return. Perry, a servant, was sent to search for him, but he too failed to return. Perry was found, and so was Harrison’s “hat and comb ‘being hackt and cut, and the band bloody.’ ”
Perry was a natural suspect, and he soon confessed, implicating not only himself, but his brother and mother in the murder as well. A few years after the three Perrys were executed for this “murder,” Harrison reappeared, very much alive.
Thus was born a common-law requirement originally restricted to the case of homicide: “a party accused of homicide ought not to be convicted on his own confession merely, without proof of the finding of the dead body of evidence
aliunde
that the party alleged to have been murdered is in fact dead.”
In discussing the rule requiring corroboration of a defendant’s extrajudicial contession, Dean Wigmore explained the meaning of the term
corpus delicti.
He noted that proof of guilt for a criminal offense may be divided conceptually into three parts:
first, the occurrence of the special kind of injury or loss (as, in homicide, a person deceased; in arson, a house burnt; in larceny, property missing); secondly, somebody’s criminality as the source of the loss,-these two together involving the commission of a crime by somebody; and, thirdly, the accused’s identity as the doer of this crime.
The first two parts — the occurrence of the injury or loss, and its causation by criminal conduct — were termed the
corpus delicti.
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OPINION
COCHRAN, J.,
delivered the opinion of the unanimous Court.
Appellant was convicted of the Class B misdemeanor of criminal mischief for “throwing screws and nails into the road causing flat tires.” On direct appeal he argued that the evidence was insufficient to establish the
corpus delicti
of the offense of criminal mischief,
i.e.,
that the damage to the tires was the result of criminal activity. The court of appeals disagreed-stating that proof of appellant’s motive and the physical evidence combined “allowed a rational fact finder in this case to conclude that the State had established the
corpus delicti
of criminal mischief.”
We granted review to clarify that the common-law
corpus-delicti
rule exists, in the post
Jackson v. Virginia
era, only in confession cases. Because the circumstantial evidence was sufficient under
Jackson v. Virginia
to prove that appellant committed the crime of criminal mischief, we affirm.
I.
The evidence at the bench trial showed that appellant lives on a quiet county road. His cousin, Ramona Gomez, lives a little farther down that county road, on a private drive. At the very end of the road is an operating oil well. Both appellant and Mrs. Gomez testified that, in late 2009 and early 2010, no one else lived off that road. The only other vehicles on the county road were the eighteen-wheelers “going up and down from the oil well.”
Mrs. Gomez and her husband had to drive past appellant’s property to go anywhere. Appellant wanted the Gomezes to stop speeding on the county road, so, in 2009, he put some large tree stumps on the road, beyond his residence but before the Gomezes’s private drive, “[t]o slow them down[.]” Mrs. Gomez testified that when she confronted appellant about the stumps, “He said maybe he did or maybe he didn’t [put them there], because we were driving too fast down the road, and that we needed to slow down.”
Later, Mrs. Gomez tried to invite appellant to her husband’s birthday party, but he rebuffed the invitation, telling her she should not be on his property. At some point, Mrs. Gomez stopped letting her children go play on appellant’s property. Then, in late 2009 and early 2010, she and her husband started getting flat tires-all caused by the same distinctive type of metal roofing screw.
Her husband got screws in all four of his already-worn tires, and he had to replace all four tires. Mrs.
Gomez had to replace two fairly new tires. The Gomezes didn’t think twice about the first couple of flat tires, but as the flats started stacking up — all caused by the identical, distinctive type of screw — they suspected that appellant had scattered the screws on the county road intending to damage their tires as they drove to and from their home. Mrs. Gomez finally called the sheriffs office on February 28, 2010. When Deputy Jennifer Lopez came out to talk to Mrs. Gomez, she, too, got a flat tire caused by identical metal roofing screws in her tire.
Bee County Sheriffs Office Investigator Steve Linam talked to appellant twice about the problem, and each time he denied putting the screws in the road.
Investigator Linam said he did not search appellant’s property, and he did not drive far down the county road, for fear of getting a flat tire also: “I drove out to the location. I looked in the immediate area [past] his driveway. I didn’t see any [roofing screws], but I did not go all the way down the road because I didn’t want to end up with flats on my car.”
At trial, appellant denied scattering screws on the county road, but he admitted placing the tree stumps in the road. He said that the screws must have gotten on the county road “accidently.”
The trial judge found appellant guilty of the charged offense and sentenced him to thirty days in jail, suspended for one year. On direct appeal, appellant argued that the evidence was insufficient to prove that the screws ended up in Mrs. Gomez’s tires because of
anyone’s
intentional or knowing act, much less his own.
But the court of appeals held that the evidence established both (1) the
corpus delicti
of the offense of criminal mischief, ,and (2) appellant’s identity as the person who committed the crime.
We granted appellant’s petition, which attacks only the first holding — that the evidence was sufficient to prove the
corpus delicti
of the offense.
II.
The
corpus delicti
rule is a common law, judicially created, doctrine — the purpose of which was to ensure that a person would not be convicted based solely on his own false confession to a crime that never occurred.
Although the exact ori
gin of the
corpus delicti
rule is not known, its history traces back to at least the 17th century in
Perry’s Case,
which refutes “the layman’s assertion: ‘he would never have confessed unless he was guilty.’ ”
In that case, Harrison set off to collect rents but failed to return. Perry, a servant, was sent to search for him, but he too failed to return. Perry was found, and so was Harrison’s “hat and comb ‘being hackt and cut, and the band bloody.’ ”
Perry was a natural suspect, and he soon confessed, implicating not only himself, but his brother and mother in the murder as well. A few years after the three Perrys were executed for this “murder,” Harrison reappeared, very much alive.
Thus was born a common-law requirement originally restricted to the case of homicide: “a party accused of homicide ought not to be convicted on his own confession merely, without proof of the finding of the dead body of evidence
aliunde
that the party alleged to have been murdered is in fact dead.”
In discussing the rule requiring corroboration of a defendant’s extrajudicial contession, Dean Wigmore explained the meaning of the term
corpus delicti.
He noted that proof of guilt for a criminal offense may be divided conceptually into three parts:
first, the occurrence of the special kind of injury or loss (as, in homicide, a person deceased; in arson, a house burnt; in larceny, property missing); secondly, somebody’s criminality as the source of the loss,-these two together involving the commission of a crime by somebody; and, thirdly, the accused’s identity as the doer of this crime.
The first two parts — the occurrence of the injury or loss, and its causation by criminal conduct — were termed the
corpus delicti.
The third element, the identity of the accused as the offender, was not considered part of the
corpus delicti
because he, of course, had already confessed to the crime.
The sufficiency of the evidence corroborating the defendant’s extrajudicial confession was assessed by determining whether the State had offered some inde
pendent evidence of the
corpus
delicti
Under the common law, the
corpus delicti
rule “concerns the usability in a criminal case of a confession made by the defendant outside of court.”
The policy of the rule was widely criticized by Dean Wigmore and others,
and it did not apply in any other context.
The old
corpus-delicti
“usability” rule has, however, been superceded by the due-process “sufficiency of the evidence” model set out in
Jackson v. Virginia.
Jackson
is the only constitutional standard of review for assessing the legal sufficiency of evidence in a criminal case.
Under that standard, we view the evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict and determine whether any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt.
It is not necessary that the evidence directly proves the defendant’s guilt; circumstantial evidence is as probative as direct evidence in establishing the guilt of the actor, and circumstantial evidence alone may be sufficient to establish guilt.
The
Jackson
standard was established to give appellate teeth to the due-process right established in
In re Winship:
“no 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.”
The application of the
corpus-de-licti
rule as it applies to convictions based on extrajudicial confessions has survived the
Jackson v. Virginia
due-process sufficiency review in Texas.
As we stated earlier this year,
When the burden of proof is “beyond a reasonable doubt,” a defendant’s extrajudicial confession does not constitute legally sufficient evidence of guilt absent independent evidence of the
corpus de-licti
The
corpus delicti
doctrine requires that evidence independent of a defendant’s extrajudicial confession show that the “essential nature” of the charged crime was committed by someone.
Appellant notes that we have occasionally applied the
corpus delicti
rule in cases that did not involve extrajudicial confessions.
In
Bussey v. State,
we relied upon an earlier case,
Zepeda v. State,
in holding that the State failed to establish the
corpus delicti
of the offense of arson-that is, the fact that the fire (the loss) was “of incendiary origin” (was the result of somebody’s criminality). But, in
Bussey,
we apparently did not notice that
Zepeda’s conviction
relied on the defendant’s extrajudicial confession, and thus we properly applied the
corpus-delicti
rule requiring corroboration of that confession.
It appears that we mistakenly applied the
corpus-delicti
rule in
Bussey,
a case that did not involve an extrajudicial confession, and we thereby confused the bench and bar.
At any rate,
Bussey
was decided several years before the
Jackson v. Virgi-
tiia
sufficiency standard was adopted, and proof of the
corpus delicti
in non-confession cases is wholly subsumed by the
Jackson
elements test. If the State proves each element beyond a reasonable doubt, there is no doubt that the crime has been committed by someone, namely the defendant. Because this case does not involve a defendant’s extrajudicial confession, there is neither need nor purpose to refer to the
corpus-delicti
doctrine. Mention of the
corpus-delicti
doctrine in a
Jackson
sufficiency review when the case does not involve a confession is, at best, just short hand for “evidence that the crime has been committed,” and, at worst, confusing.
Such confusion is apparent in appellant’s main argument that the court of appeals inappropriately “conflated identity with
corpus delicti.”
The State did not have to prove any
corpus delicti,
it had to prove every element of the criminal-mischief offense beyond a reasonable doubt.
III.
A person commits criminal mischief if, without the effective consent of the owner he intentionally or knowingly damages or destroys the tangible property of the owner.
The court of appeals emphasized four pieces of evidence in holding that the State proved that appellant intentionally or knowingly damaged or destroyed the Gomezes’ tires:
* Appellant admitted that he had an ongoing conflict with the Gomezes over the speed at which they drove past his house on the county road.
* Appellant admitted that he had placed logs in the roadway in an attempt to slow the Gomezes down, but that the logs had not curbed their speeding.
* Mrs. Gomez stated that she had lived off the county road for some 80 years, and had never, until this dispute arose with appellant, encountered hazards on the road.
* The patrol officer who went to the Gomezes’ home to take the initial report ended up with a flat tire caused by the same type of roofing screws that caused the flat tires on the Go-mezes’s vehicles.
Appellant acknowledges this circumstantial evidence as proof of both identity and that “the officer and Gomez drove on the same roads and that there were screws on that road,” but says the evidence does not support an inference that criminality was the source of the loss, as opposed to accident.
He complains that the court “improperly conflated identity with
corpus delicti
.... [TJhere was no appropriate reason for the court of appeals to include identity evidence in the
coipus-delicti
analysis.”
Au contraire. The court of appeals, charged with deciding whether the evidence was legally sufficient, was entitled to consider the logical force of all the circumstantial evidence as it pertained to each element of criminal mischief-including criminal intent. And we agree with the State that the Gomezes,
the investigatory officers, and the trial judge could all reasonably apply Wig-more’s “doctrine of chances” to these facts to conclude — beyond a reasonable doubt— that the tire damage in this case was caused by appellant’s intentional act rather than by an inadvertent accident.
“The ‘doctrine of chances’ tells us that highly unusual events are unlikely to repeat themselves inadvertently or by happenstance.”
It is not every day that one gets a flat tire; it is more uncommon that the flat tires keep coming; and it is more uncommon still that they are all caused by the same distinctive and specialized roofing screw. Mrs. Gomez, Mr. Gomez, and Deputy Lopez all had their tires punctured by multiple identical roofing screws over a period of months — making it likely that they got them on the stretch of the county road beyond appellant’s house but before the Gomezes’s house, or on their private road. Even appellant agreed that the only other traffic on any part of that stretch of road were the eighteen-wheelers driving to the well at the end of the county road — oil trucks with no known reason to be carrying metal roofing screws. And, perhaps most importantly, appellant admitted that he put logs in that very same stretch of road only months before to intentionally create an obstruction for the Gomezes and make them slow down. This prior act of putting obstructions in the road with the intent to harm the Gomezes was strong circumstantial evidence rebutting the “accident” theory.
In
Drager v. State,
for example, the defendant was prosecuted for criminal mischief for intentionally driving a tractor into a barn. At trial, the defendant admitted damaging the tractor, but claimed that the collision was an accident; he testified that he saw the tractor going down the road without a driver; that he was being a good neighbor by trying to stop it.
We held that the jury did not have to believe the defendant’s “accident” explanation, and his admission that he was on probation for damaging a different tractor was a circumstance showing his intent to damage.
As
in
Drager,
the trial judge in this case was not required to believe appellant’s explanation that the roofing screws must have appeared on the county road “accidently,” and the trial judge could find criminal intent from appellant’s prior similar act of putting obstructions in the road to slow his neighbors down. We agree with the court of appeals that, although some testimony supported an inference that the Gomezes could have picked up the screws in their tires elsewhere, it was the trial judge’s job to resolve the conflicting evidence, and he determined that appellant intentionally damaged property “by throwing screws and nails into the road causing flat tires.”
We affirm the judgment of the court of appeals.