Christopher Garfias v. State

381 S.W.3d 626, 2012 Tex. App. LEXIS 6622, 2012 WL 3207269
Court of Appeals of Texas·Decided August 9, 2012·No. 02-06-00398-CR·Published·Cited by 10 cases

Opinion

OPINION ON REMAND

TERRIE LIVINGSTON, Chief Justice.

In one issue raised within his supplemental brief on the remand of this appeal from the court of criminal appeals, 1 appellant Christopher Garfias contends that his convictions for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon violate his constitutional right to be free from double jeopardy. We affirm in part and vacate in part.

Background Facts

One early morning in 2006, appellant went to a gas station store in Hurst and shot the clerk, Shahid Shahid, four times, critically injuring him. As a result of that one event, a Tarrant County grand jury returned a two-count indictment charging appellant with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and aggravated assault *628 with a deadly weapon. 2 The indictment alleged that appellant,

on or about the 1st day of March 2006, did

THEN AND THERE INTENTIONALLY OR KNOWINGLY, WHILE IN THE COURSE OF COMMITTING THEFT OF PROPERTY AND WITH INTENT TO OBTAIN OR MAINTAIN CONTROL OF SAID PROPERTY, THREATEN OR PLACE SHAHID SHAHID IN FEAR OF IMMINENT BODILY INJURY OR DEATH, AND THE DEFENDANT USED OR EXHIBITED A DEADLY WEAPON, TO WIT: A FIREARM,
COUNT TWO: AND IT IS FURTHER PRESENTED IN AND TO SAID COURT THAT THE DEFENDANT IN THE COUNTY OF TAR-RANT AND STATE AFORESAID ON OR ABOUT THE 1ST DAY OF MARCH, 2006, DID INTENTIONALLY OR KNOWINGLY CAUSE BODILY INJURY TO SHAHID SHAHID BY SHOOTING HIM WITH A FIREARM AND THE DEFENDANT DID USE OR EXHIBIT A DEADLY WEAPON DURING THE COMMISSION OF THE ASSAULT, TO-WIT: A FIREARM[.] [Emphasis added.]

Appellant’s court-appointed counsel filed several pretrial documents but did not assert at any point in the trial court’s proceedings that constitutional prohibitions against double jeopardy prevented appellant from being tried for and convicted of both offenses. Appellant pled not guilty to both offenses, but the jury convicted him of both of them. After hearing additional evidence and argument, the jury assessed his punishment at sixty years’ confinement for the aggravated robbery conviction and imprisonment for life for the aggravated assault conviction. 3 The trial court sentenced appellant in accordance with the jury’s verdict and ordered the sentences to run concurrently.

Appellant appealed his convictions to this court, raising five points. In his first two points, he argued that the two convictions violated his federal Fifth Amendment right to be free from double jeopardy. In this court’s June 2008 prior opinion, the court rejected all of appellant’s points, including his argument about double jeopardy. See Garfias, 2008 WL 2404268, at *1-4. Concerning double jeopardy, the court held, under the standard articulated by the court of criminal appeals in Gonzalez v. State 4 that appellant had not preserved his complaint for our review because a violation of double jeopardy was not clearly apparent on the face of the record. Garfias, 2008 WL 2404268, at *1-2. The court concluded that under Blockburger v. United States, 5 because aggravated robbery and aggravated assault, as charged in the indictment, each required proof of at least one element that the other did not, the offenses were not subsumed within each other. Garfias, 2008 WL 2404268, at *1-2. After granting appellant’s petition for discretionary review, the court of criminal appeals vacated this court’s prior judgment and remanded the appeal. Garfias, 2011 WL 2674848, at *3. That court explained,

*629 In the course of conducting only a Blockbwrger analysis, the court of appeals noted that the aggravating element of robbery that was pled in the indictment was that the appellant “threatened or placed” his victim “in fear of imminent bodily injury or death,” while the aggravating element alleged for the assault was that the appellant actually “caused bodily injury.” ...

While we do not disagree with the court of appeals’s Blockbwrger analysis, we disagree that such an analysis sufficiently answers whether a double-jeopardy violation is clear from the face of the record for purposes of error preservation under Gonzalez.

In another Gonzales [v. State 6 ] case (different spelling), we recently explained:

The Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment, applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, protects an accused against a second prosecution for the same offense for which he has been previously acquitted or previously convicted. It also protects him from being punished more than once for the same offense in a single prosecution. Sameness in this latter context is purely a matter of legislative intent. With respect to cumulative sentences imposed in a single trial, the Double Jeopardy Clause does no more than prevent the sentencing court from prescribing greater punishment than the legislature intended.
The traditional indicium of that legislative intent is the so-called same elements test of Blockburger v. United States. According to that test, it should be presumed that the Legislature did not regard two statutorily defined offenses to be the same so long as each provision requires proof of a fact which the other does not. However, for purposes of multiple-punishment analysis, the Blockburger test is only a tool of statutory construction — and not even an exclusive one. An accused may be punished for two offenses even though they would be regarded as the same under a Blockbwrger analysis if the Legislature has otherwise made manifest its intention that he should be.
In Ex parte Ervin, [ 7 ] we recognized that [t]he Blockburger test’s status as a mere rule of statutory construction raises an inverse conclusion as well: the Blockburger test cannot authorize two punishments where the legislature clearly intended only one. Thus, even if a straightforward application of the Blockburger test would suggest that two offenses are not the same for double jeopardy purposes, if other indicia manifest a legislative intent that an accused not be punished for both offenses if they occur in the course of a single transaction, then an accused may not be punished for both offenses even if both convictions result from a single trial....

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Christopher Garfias v. State, 381 S.W.3d 626, 2012 Tex. App. LEXIS 6622, 2012 WL 3207269 (Tex. Ct. App. 2012).

381 S.W.3d 626 (Christopher Garfias v. State) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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