Crawford v. State

509 S.W.3d 359, 2017 WL 612070, 2017 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 210
Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas·Decided February 15, 2017·No. NO. PD-1283-15·Published·Cited by 3 cases

Opinions

OPINION

Yeary, J.,

delivered the opinion of the Coui't

in which Keller, P.J., and Keasler, Richardson, Newell, and Keel, JJ., joined.

Pleading guilty to the offense of sexual assault in 1984, Appellant was convicted and later required to register as a sex offender. Twice after that, in 2007 and then again in 2009, he was convicted of the felony offense of failing to comply with sex-offender-registration requirements. In 2013, he was once again indicted for failing to comply with sex-offender-registration requirements, a third degree felony under Article 62.102(b)(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Tex. Code Crim. Proc. art. 62.102(b)(2). Moreover, the 2013 indictment alleged the two previous felony sex-offender-registration offenses in enhancement paragraphs, to bring Appellant within the ambit of Section 12.42(d) of the Penal Code and thereby raise his exposure to a term of life, or not more than 99 years or less than 25 years, in the penitentiary. Appellant objected to the application of Section 12.42(d) to enhance his punishment, but nevertheless pled true to the enhancement paragraphs. A jury found them to be true and assessed his punishment at a term of 85 years in the penitentiary.

On appeal, Appellant again challenged the legality of his enhanced sentence. He argued that the State could not use prior felony offenses for failure to comply with sex-offender-registration requirements to punish him as a habitual felony offender for a subsequent sex-offender-registration offense under Section 12.42(d) of the Penal Code.1 As he did in the trial court, he pointed out that the sex-offender-registration scheme has its own specialized provision for enhancing a sex-offender-registration offense with prior sex-offender-registration infractions. Article 62.102(c) of the Code of Criminal Procedure provides that, if it is “shown at the trial” that a sex-offender-registration offender has been previously convicted of a sex-offender-registration offense, then his punishment “is increased to the punishment for the next highest degree of felony.”2 Appellant contends that he should have been punished under this provision, which would have exposed him to the range of punishment for a second degree offender, a range of only two to twenty years. Tex Penal Code § 12.33(a). Because he received a sentence greatly in excess of that range, Appellant argued, he was harmed. In an unpublished opinion, the [361] Tenth Court of Appeals rejected Appellant’s argument. Crawford v. State, No. 10-14-00127-CR, 2015 WL 5656004, at *1-3 (Tex. App.—Waco 2015) (mem. op., not designated for publication).

We granted Appellant’s petition for discretionary review in order to review Appellant’s contention that the court of appeals erred to hold that the State could invoke Section 12.42(d) to punish him as a habitual offender. Appellant argues that, at least when it comes to enhancing sex-offender-registration offenses with prior sex-offender-registration offenses, Article 62.102(c) covers the field—to the exclusion of any application of Section 12.42(d). We disagree and will affirm the judgment of the court of appeals.

It is true that we have held that, when the Legislature has enacted a more specific enhancement scheme, the more specific scheme will control over the general enhancement regime of Section 12.42. For example, in Rawlings v. State, 602 S.W.2d 268 (Tex. Grim. App. 1980), we held that a conviction for theft of property having a value of less than $200 could only be enhanced with other theft convictions under the auspices of a specific enhancement pro1 vision in the theft statute. There are two notable features of Rawlings that are relevant to the issue in the present case. First, we insisted that the existence of a specific regime for enhancing a theft conviction with another theft conviction did not mean that the general enhancement provision contained in Section 12.42 could not apply to enhance a felony theft of property less than $200 in value with some other prior felony conviction, such as murder. Id. at 269, 271. Extrapolating from the holding in Rawlings, the mere existence of Article 62.102(c) does not prohibit the enhancement of a sex-offender-registration offense with prior non-sex-offender-registration offenses, such as murder or burglary, under Section 12.42. Indeed, Appellant does not contend otherwise.

The second, and more salient, feature to note about Rawlings is that the specific enhancement provision in the theft-of-less-than-$200 statute expressly addressed how to enhance with multiple prior convictions for theft. The specific enhancement provision in the theft statute, at issue in Rawl-ings, explicitly set out how to enhance the punishment for a conviction for theft of property valued at less than $200 where “the defendant has been previously convicted two or more times of any grade of theft[.]” Id. at 270 (quoting then-Section 31.03(d) of the Penal Code). We analogized to other specific enhancement provisions that likewise addressed the enhancement of particular offenses when the defendant had previously been convicted one or more times of that same particular offense. Id. at 270-71; see Edwards v. State, 166 Tex. Crim. 301, 313 S.W.2d 618 (1958) (holding that the general enhancement provisions did not control where the D.W.I. statute provided its own enhancement scheme making “each and every subsequent such violation” a felony subject to five years’ incarceration); Heredia v. State, 468 S.W.2d 833 (Tex. Crim. App. 1971) (holding that the specific enhancement regime providing the grade of offense for violating the former Narcotic Drug Act “upon the second or any subsequent conviction therefor” controlled over the predecessor to Section 12,42’s general enhancement scheme).

By contrast, Article 62.102(c) only addresses how to enhance a subsequent sex-offender-registration offense with a single prior sex-offender-registration felony offense. It only speaks to how to enhance a sex-offender-registration offense when the offender “has previously been convicted of an offense ... under this article!)]” Tex. Code Crim. Proc. art. 62.102(c) (emphasis [362] added). It does not expressly say how a sex-offender-registration defendant may be enhanced in the event that he should have incurred multiple prior sex-offender-registration offenses.

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Crawford v. State, 509 S.W.3d 359, 2017 WL 612070, 2017 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 210 (Tex. 2017).

509 S.W.3d 359 (Crawford v. State) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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