Washington v. State

127 S.W.3d 111, 2003 WL 22310858
CourtCourt of Appeals of Texas
DecidedOctober 9, 2003
Docket01-02-00927-CR
StatusPublished
Cited by22 cases

This text of 127 S.W.3d 111 (Washington 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
Washington v. State, 127 S.W.3d 111, 2003 WL 22310858 (Tex. Ct. App. 2003).

Opinion

127 S.W.3d 111 (2003)

Gaynette Marie WASHINGTON, Appellant,
v.
The STATE of Texas, Appellee.

No. 01-02-00927-CR.

Court of Appeals of Texas, Houston (1st Dist.).

October 9, 2003.

*112 Alvin Nunnery, Houston, for appellant.

Gaynette Marie Washington, Houston, pro se.

Carol M. Cameron, Assistant District Attorney, Charles A. Rosenthal, Jr., District Attorney-Harris County, William J. Delmore, III, Chief Prosecutor, Appellate Division, Houston, for appellee.

Panel consists of Chief Justice RADACK and Justices KEYES and ALCALA.

OPINION

ELSA ALCALA, Justice.

Appellant, Gaynette Marie Washington, pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor offense of false report to a peace officer. A jury found appellant guilty, and the trial court assessed punishment at 45 days' confinement in the Harris County Jail. In her first point of error, appellant contends that the court reporter's failure to record the voir dire proceedings was reversible error. In her second point of error, appellant contends that the State made an improper closing argument. In her final two points of error, appellant challenges the legal and factual sufficiency of the evidence to support her conviction. We affirm.

Background

Appellant was charged in a two-paragraph indictment with the misdemeanor offense of false report to a peace officer. A person commits this offense if, with intent to deceive, he knowingly makes a false statement that is material to a criminal investigation and makes the statement to a peace officer conducting an investigation. Tex. Pen.Code Ann. § 37.08(a)(1) (Vernon 2003).

On March 25, 2002, Houston Police Officer Warren Hayward responded to a disturbance call at the Oxford Place apartments on 605 Berry Road, where he and assisting officer, Officer Alberto Garcia, arrested a male and a female suspect. As Officer Hayward was leaving the scene with the suspects in his vehicle, a dispatch call was broadcast over Hayward's police radio to pick up Keara Greer, a juvenile suspect in an aggravated assault case. One of the suspects in Hayward's custody told Hayward that Greer lived in the same apartment complex and described Greer as a female seen leaving apartment 196, where both suspects had just been apprehended.

Later that morning, acting in response to the earlier dispatch call to pick up Keara Greer, Officers Hayward and Garcia returned to apartment 196 at 605 Berry *113 Road. When appellant answered the door, the officers explained that they were attempting to locate Greer as a suspect in an aggravated assault case and asked appellant whether Greer was at the apartment. Appellant initially denied that she knew Greer, but when told that Greer had been seen leaving appellant's apartment that day, appellant changed her story and admitted that she knew Greer, but claimed that she had not seen her that day and denied that Greer was at home. When the officers asked appellant for identification, she became hostile, yelled at the officers and cursed them. As the officers were noting appellant's identification information, they saw a young man leave one of the bedrooms in the apartment. The officers asked the man whether he knew Greer and, if so, where she was. When the man replied that he did know Greer and that she was in the bedroom, the officers entered the apartment and found Greer in the bedroom. They arrested Greer and also arrested appellant for making false statements to a police officer.

Omission of Voir Dire Proceedings from Reporter's Record

In her first point of error, appellant contends that she is entitled to a new trial because the appellate record does not contain the voir dire proceedings. Appellant contends that the court reporter did not comply with official duties mandated by rule 13.1 of the Rules of Appellate Procedure. See Tex.R.App. P. 13.1(a). As amended in 1997, the Rules of Appellate Procedure impose a duty on the official court reporter to attend court sessions and make a full record of the proceedings "unless excused by agreement of the parties." Id.; see Polasek v. State, 16 S.W.3d 82, 88 (Tex.App.-Houston [1st Dist.] 2000, pet. ref'd) (en banc opinion on motion for rehearing). The record does not reflect that the parties agreed to waive a record of the voir dire proceedings, and we acknowledge that the record does not include the voir dire proceedings. Yet, the requirements of rule 13.1 notwithstanding, nothing in the record establishes or even suggests that the lack of the record of the voir dire proceedings stems from the court reporter's failure to record them.

Appellant relies on Tanguma v. State, 47 S.W.3d 663 (Tex.App.-Corpus Christi 2001, pet. ref'd), in which the Corpus Christi Court of Appeals held that the failure of the court reporter, without agreement of the parties, to record and transcribe all bench conferences that occurred after the trial had begun was error. Id. at 674.[1] The Tanguma court further concluded, however, that the error was neither structural, nor constitutional, nor was it error that affected the defendant's substantial rights. Id. at 675, 676, 680.[2]

Tanguma and this Court's opinion in Polasek both recognize that rule 13.1(a) requires the official court reporter to attend court sessions and make a full record of the proceedings unless excused by agreement of the parties. Polasek, 16 S.W.3d at 88; Tanguma, 47 S.W.3d at 670. The court reporter's duty under rule 13.1(a) changes practice under former rule 11(a)(1) and (2), which conditioned the *114 court reporter's duty on a request by either (1) the trial judge or any party to a case, in the case of "the evidence," or (2) the attorney for any party, in the case of "the jury arguments and voir dire examination." See Polasek, 16 S.W.3d at 88; Tanguma, 47 S.W.3d at 670 (citing former TEX.R.APP. P. 11(a)(1) and (2), 49 Tex. B.J. 561 (Tex. Sup.Ct. and Tex.Crim.App. 1986)).

We note at the outset that, in Tanguma, in contrast to this case, the record established why the court reporter had not reported the bench conferences. In every instance of an unrecorded bench conference challenged in the appeal, the court reporter had indicated that the proceedings "were not requested to be reported." Id. at 672, 673. Here, the record offers no explanation for the omission of voir dire from the reporter's record. An additional distinction is that the Corpus Christi court narrowly limited its holding to "proceedings that occur after the trial or hearing has begun with a court reporter properly in attendance and recording the proceedings." Id. at 674 n. 4 (emphasis added). The record here does not establish these parameters.

More importantly, in Tanguma, the Thirteenth Court of Appeals rejected this Court's Polasek decision, which appellant implicitly asks us to disregard by relying on Tanguma. See id. at 671. In Polasek, this Court affirmed a judgment of conviction after overruling the single point of error of a defendant who also sought a new trial by arguing that the court reporter's failure to record the voir dire proceedings constituted fundamental, automatically reversible error. Id. at 88-89.

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127 S.W.3d 111, 2003 WL 22310858, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/washington-v-state-texapp-2003.