Newsome v. State

235 S.W.3d 341, 2007 Tex. App. LEXIS 7098, 2007 WL 2460367
CourtCourt of Appeals of Texas
DecidedAugust 31, 2007
Docket2-06-374-CR
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 235 S.W.3d 341 (Newsome v. State) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Texas primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Newsome v. State, 235 S.W.3d 341, 2007 Tex. App. LEXIS 7098, 2007 WL 2460367 (Tex. Ct. App. 2007).

Opinion

OPINION

LEE ANN DAUPHINOT, Justice.

A jury found Appellant Christopher Britton Newsome guilty of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and assessed his punishment at sixty years’ confinement. The trial court sentenced him accordingly. Appellant brings three points on appeal. In his first point, Appellant contends that the trial court abused its discretion by failing to find good cause for Appellant’s untimely filing of his notice of intent to raise the insanity defense and by prohibiting Appellant from raising the insanity defense. In his second and third points, Appellant challenges the legal and factual sufficiency of the evidence. Because we hold that the trial court did not err and that the evidence is legally and factually sufficient, we affirm the trial court’s judgment.

Regarding Appellant’s notice of intent to raise the insanity defense, Article 46C.052 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure provides that “[ujnless notice is timely filed under Article 46C.051, evidence on the insanity defense is not admissible unless the court finds that good cause exists for failure to give notice.” 1 Article 46C.051 provides that the notice must “be filed at least 20 days before the date the case is set for trial, except [that] [i]f before the 20-day period the court sets a pretrial hearing, the defendant shall give notice at the hearing.” 2

This case was originally set for trial in August 2006 but apparently was reset for October 10, 2006, when voir dire began. Appellant filed a notice of intent to raise the insanity defense on October 11 after the jury had already been sworn on October 10. The notice stated that “[g]ood cause exists ... [because] this notice is filed at the very same time Defendant’s counsel became aware of the issue of [Appellant’s] competency to stand trial.” Affidavits of family members and trial counsel were attached in support of the notice, but none addressed good cause. Trial counsel’s affidavit provided,

On October 10, 2006, defendant’s counsel was interviewing witnesses in preparation for trial on October 12, 2006. During this interview, one family member related that the Defendant has for some years heard voices and seen people who are not apparent to others.... Upon further investigation, everyone who knows the Defendant confirms that he suffers these delusions almost daily.... While I have not observed any of these episodes[,] I have *343 noticed erratic behavior evidenced by inexplicable outbursts which causes me to be concerned that Defendant may not have sufficient present ability to consult with me with a reasonable degree of rational understanding!;,] or that he may not have a ... rational, as well as, a factual understanding of the proceedings against him....

On October 12, the trial court stated on the record that a discussion had occurred in chambers on October 11 regarding the notice. That in-chambers discussion does not appear in the record. On the record, Appellant argued to the trial court, “the good cause is that even after having interviewed these people many times and having interviewed this man many times, I had never been told or [no]body had ever revealed to me the issues contained in the affidavit ... until ... Tuesday afternoon [October 10, 2006] at about 4:30 p.m.” The trial court noted that Appellant’s trial counsel had been appointed on February 22, 2006 and found that the notice was untimely and that “there ha[d] not been good cause shown that would justify the failure to timely file a notice of intent to raise [the] insanity defense.”. Appellant made an offer of proof while the jury was deliberating guilt, calling Appellant’s parents to testify in support of the insanity defense. That testimony, though, like the affidavits, does not address good cause for the delay in filing the notice. We hold that the trial court did not abuse its discretion by finding that Appellant had not shown good cause for the untimely notice or by prohibiting Appellant from raising the insanity defense. We overrule Appellant’s first point.

In his second and third points, Appellant contends that the evidence is legally and factually insufficient to support his conviction. In its primary response, the State relies on the DeGarmo 3 doctrine to argue that Appellant waived error by admitting in punishment phase testimony that he had hit his wife, the complainant, with his shotgun. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals eviscerated this doctrine in Leday v. State 4 but sufficiency of the evidence was not at issue in Leday. 5 As the Corpus Christi court has explained,

In Leday, the court of criminal appeals abandoned the DeGarmo doctrine as applied to certain constitutional, legal, and social guarantees — what the court described as “due process and those individual rights that are fundamental to our quality of life.” One of these “guarantees” is that the judgment in a criminal trial must be supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Thus, under a literal reading of Leday, a legal-sufficiency challenge is not waived by a defendant’s admission of guilt at the punishment phase.
Unfortunately, the holding in Leday is not as broad as it appears. Leday did not involve a challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence; the issue was whether the trial court erred by admitting evidence over the defendant’s objection. Thus, the holding in Leday is limited to the court’s resolution of the issue presented: a defendant’s admission of guilt does not waive a court’s erroneous admission of evidence.
In reaching this holding, the Leday court addressed and refuted the numerous justifications offered for the DeGar-mo doctrine, including, among other *344 things, waiver, estoppel, harmless error, characterization of the doctrine as a “common-sense rule of procedure,” and any “analogy to the guilty plea.” Although the court’s analysis was strongly worded, the Leday decision did not overrule the DeGarmo doctrine completely. Leday involved only one issue: the admissibility of evidence. To the extent Leday overruled the DeGarmo doctrine, it did so only on that issue.
We are thus back where we started: does the DeGarmo doctrine preclude appellant from challenging the legal sufficiency of the evidence? We find the answer in the holding of the DeGarmo opinion itself. In DeGarmo, the defendant admitted guilt at the punishment phase of trial. He then challenged the legal sufficiency of the evidence on appeal. After submission of the case, the court of criminal appeals “carefully reviewed the evidence” and found it “more than sufficient to sustain the verdict of the jury....” According to the court, the evidence “would permit a rational trier of fact to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
235 S.W.3d 341, 2007 Tex. App. LEXIS 7098, 2007 WL 2460367, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/newsome-v-state-texapp-2007.