Carter Carol Cervantez v. State

Court of Appeals of Texas·Decided November 8, 2018·No. 02-16-00224-CR·Published

Opinion

In the

Court of Appeals

Second Appellate District of Texas at Fort Worth

No. 02-16-00224-CR

CARTER CAROL CERVANTEZ, Appellant V.

THE STATE OF TEXAS

On Appeal from the 297th District Court Tarrant County, Texas

Trial Court No. 1395158D

Before Walker and Pittman, JJ., and Charles Bleil, Senior Justice, Retired Memorandum Opinion by Justice Pittman

MEMORANDUM OPINION

Carter Carol Cervantez appeals from her jury conviction for capital murder and automatic life sentence. She raises three points on appeal: (1) the trial court erred by denying her counsel’s motion to withdraw based on the State’s failure to comply with the Michael Morton Act; (2) the trial court erred by admitting recorded statements of her accomplice when he was not available for cross-examination; and (3) the trial court erred by denying her motions to suppress. We affirm.

BACKGROUND

Cervantez does not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence to support her conviction. Because her issues on appeal are procedural, we provide only a short background.

Our review of the record shows sufficient evidence to prove that Cervantez and her boyfriend Clarence David Mallory––former employees of an American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) store at Hulen Mall who had been suspected of stealing almost $18,000 from the store’s safe and were subsequently fired––drove to the assistant store manager Ashlea Harris’s apartment, hit and choked her, bound her hands and feet with duct tape, and set fire to the apartment and her body. The evidence also supports a reasonable inference that they stole Harris’s keys, which included the AEO store keys, and attempted to burglarize the store again early the next morning, the day after Black Friday sales. Fort Worth police, who had been staking out Cervantez’s residence, followed the pair to the mall and arrested Mallory in his car outside after

Cervantez went inside. Police could not find Cervantez inside the mall but found her later in the laundry room at her apartment; surveillance video confirmed she had walked the two miles home.

The police’s investigation of the crime scene had quickly led to Cervantez and Mallory because • one witness at Harris’s apartment complex saw a 2008 black Infiniti with a toll tag parked next to Harris’s car at 7:00 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. the morning of the murder;

• a second witness who lived in the apartment below Harris’s saw a 2008 black Infiniti G351 leaving the apartment complex around 7:30 a.m. after hearing a prolonged loud scream or yell, followed by a thud, labored breathing, and the door slamming, from Harris’s apartment; and • the AEO store manager told police that Harris had been responsible for reporting Cervantez and Mallory as suspects in the prior theft and that Cervantez drove a black Infiniti.

After a grand jury indicted Cervantez, the State waived the death penalty and tried Cervantez before Mallory.

1 Cervantez drove an Infiniti G37, which a witness testified look alike.

DISCUSSION

I. Denial of Attorney Ray’s Motion to Withdraw Was Not An Abuse of Discretion

In her first point, Cervantez complains that the trial court erred by denying a motion to withdraw by one of her trial attorneys, Bill Ray,2 which was based on the State’s alleged delay in providing discovery items in violation of the Michael Morton Act. According to Cervantez, “[t]his is a case of first impression . . . as to what should happen when the State does not provide a significant percentage of its case and the defense is compelled to review the matters provided late, and continue without the adequate time to examine the case as a whole.” Although her argument appears to primarily complain about the trial court’s denial of her verbal motion for continuance, we cannot review that ruling on appeal. See Blackshear v. State, 385 S.W.3d 589, 591 (Tex. Crim. App. 2012). Thus, we will instead review whether the trial judge abused his discretion by denying Ray’s motion to withdraw.

A. Law Applicable to Attorney Ray’s Motion to Withdraw We review a trial court’s decision on a motion to withdraw for an abuse of discretion. King v. State, 29 S.W.3d 556, 566 (Tex. Crim. App. 2000); Johnson v. State, 352 S.W.3d 224, 227 (Tex. App.—Houston [14th Dist.] 2011, pet. ref’d). The trial court should balance the matters asserted with the potential for obstruction to the judicial process or interference with the administration of justice. King, 29 S.W.3d at

2 The trial court had appointed Steve Gordon as Cervantez’s other trial counsel.

566; Ibarra v. State, 456 S.W.3d 349, 355 (Tex. App.—Houston [14th Dist.] 2015, pet. ref’d).

The Michael Morton Act amended and enlarged article 39.14 of the code of criminal procedure relating to the State’s duty to provide discovery to criminal defendants. See Act of May 14, 2013, 83rd Leg., R.S., ch. 49, §§ 1–2, 2013 Tex. Sess. Law Serv. 106, 106–08; Moody v. State, 551 S.W.3d 167, 171 (Tex. App.––Fort Worth 2017, no pet.). Article 38.14(a) requires the State to provide discoverable material “as soon as practicable” upon receiving a defendant’s timely request, and subsection (j) requires that before trial the parties must “acknowledge in writing or on the record in open court the disclosure, receipt, and list of all documents, items, and information provided to the defendant” in accordance with the statute. Tex. Code Crim. Proc. Ann. art. 39.14(a), (j) (West Supp. 2018). Article 39.14 does not contain an express remedy for the State’s delay in providing discovery items. See id. art. 39.14.

B. Background Facts Applicable to Attorney Ray’s Motion to Withdraw Immediately before trial began, Attorney Ray informed the trial court in the context of arguing a motion to suppress that the State had not made 162 discoverable items available to the defense until less than 40 days before trial and had not made 46 or 48 of those items available to the defense until less than 30 days before trial. Ray did not list the specific items, and the State responded by identifying some items that had been available to the defense since 2014 and 2015. The prosecutor also told the trial judge that the State had transitioned to a different electronic discovery system

while the case had been pending, that the transition had been “rocky,” and that in the past couple of months before trial––when Ray informed the State he was having trouble accessing documents––the State was able to show him where they were located in the system. But the prosecutor could not verify that every document had been made accessible to the defense.

Attorney Ray referred specifically to a GPS unit upon which he was trying to obtain testing; he asserted that although the State had possessed the unit since January 2015, he did not know about its existence until April 15, 2016, a month before trial. He had filed a motion to suppress any information from the GPS and any cell phone and cell tower data that testing of the GPS unit could possibly support or contradict. The State told the trial judge it was not intending to offer the GPS records, and the trial judge indicated that he would suppress them anyway. But Ray stated that depending on whether he could get testing of the GPS unit, he might be able to use those results to support his motion to suppress the cell phone and cell tower records.3 When the trial court asked, “So you’re making a possible Brady request?” he answered yes.

The State responded,

We did not have a report on the GPS analysis. The -- just so we’re real clear on the record as to what we are talking about, there was a GPS unit in the vehicle, and that was analyzed, separate and apart from

3 Cervantez concedes in her brief that the GPS unit ultimately failed to yield any results.

the telephones. That warrant and affidavit to do that has been in TechShare -- ECFS . . . for the pendency of this litigation. The -- there was an analysis going on, but we didn’t get the report until shortly before the -- a little while ago, March.

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