Kyle Daniel Murray v. the State of Texas

• Court: Court of Appeals of Texas
• Decided: August 23, 2023
• Docket: 07-23-00013-CR
• Status: Published

Opinion

In The Court of Appeals Seventh District of Texas at Amarillo

No. 07-23-00013-CR

KYLE DANIEL MURRAY, APPELLANT

V.

THE STATE OF TEXAS, APPELLEE

On Appeal from the 100th District Court Hall County, Texas Trial Court No. 3909, Honorable Stuart Messer, Presiding

August 23, 2023 MEMORANDUM OPINION Before QUINN, C.J., and DOSS and YARBROUGH, JJ.

Appellant, Kyle Daniel Murray, appeals from the trial court’s judgment revoking his

community supervision and sentencing him to serve seven years in prison. He challenges

the judgment through seven issues. Each involves the sufficiency of the evidence

supporting the decision to revoke. And, each is founded upon the argument that the

“chronos,” or chronological records maintained by the probation department, were

inadmissible due to a deficient “predicate.” 1 We affirm.

1 We note the State did not file an appellee’s brief. Background

In mid-February 2019, appellant was placed on community supervision for a period

of ten years. The State filed a motion to revoke same, alleging that appellant violated

several conditions to remaining on community supervision. At the hearing, the State

offered testimony of Becky Fuller, the director of the district’s probation department. She

utilized the substance of the “chronos” to establish the violations committed by appellant.

Appellant objected to that, which objection the trial court overruled. Ultimately, the trial

court found the evidence sufficient to support revocation and, therefore, revoked

appellant’s community supervision, adjudicated him guilty of unlawfully possessing a

firearm, and assessed the aforementioned punishment.

Analysis

In asserting his complaint at bar, appellant does not precisely explain why he

thought the chronological records were inadmissible. He simply alludes to the witness’s

lacking “personal knowledge of the entries in these ‘chronos’” and lack of a “proper

predicate [being] . . . made for their admission even as a business record.” What elements

of the “proper predicate” were missing, according to appellant, went unsaid.

Nevertheless, we have held that a chronological file compiled by a community

supervision officer “may be admissible as a business record, even though the testifying

witness does not have personal knowledge of the entries in the file, so long as the person

who made the entries did have personal knowledge of the facts therein.” Estrada v. State,

No. 07-21-00298-CR, 2023 Tex. App. LEXIS 1049, at *6 (Tex. App.—Amarillo Feb. 17,

2023, no pet.) (mem. op., not designated for publication). Fuller so testified; that is, she

said that though she may have lacked personal knowledge about the events described in

2 the entries, those probation officers who actually made the entries had such knowledge.

Other of her testimony revealed that 1) the records were made in the ordinary course of

the department’s business; 2) the department’s regular practice was to make those

records; 3) an employee of the department made them; 4) the records were made at or

near the time of the event described therein or reasonably soon after the event described

therein; and 4) she was the department’s director and custodian. In so uttering this

information, her testimony addressed, and satisfied, the elements to the business record

exception to the hearsay rule. See TEX. R. EVID. 803(6)(A)-(D) (specifying the elements).

Thus, we cannot say that the trial court erred in admitting the “chronos.” Moreover, the

evidence within them sufficed to illustrate, by a preponderance of the evidence, that

appellant violated one or more conditions of his community supervision. An example of

that was appellant’s admission to the use of methamphetamine while on probation.

In short, the trial court’s decision to revoke had ample evidentiary basis. See

Walker v. State, No. 07-21-00074-CR, 2021 Tex. App. LEXIS 9389, at *3 (Tex. App.—

Amarillo Nov. 18, 2021, no pet.) (mem. op., not designated for publication) (stating that

proof of one violation is enough to support the revocation of a defendant’s community

supervision). So, we affirm the judgment of the trial court.

Brian Quinn Chief Justice

Do not publish.