Worthy v. State

312 S.W.3d 34, 2010 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 686, 2010 WL 2292303
CourtCourt of Criminal Appeals of Texas
DecidedJune 9, 2010
DocketPD-0924-09
StatusPublished
Cited by41 cases

This text of 312 S.W.3d 34 (Worthy v. State) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Worthy v. State, 312 S.W.3d 34, 2010 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 686, 2010 WL 2292303 (Tex. 2010).

Opinions

OPINION

COCHRAN, J.,

delivered the opinion of the Court

in which PRICE, WOMACK, JOHNSON, KEASLER, HERVEY and HOLCOMB, JJ., joined.

We granted appellant’s petition for discretionary review to resolve a conflict among the courts of appeals1 concerning whether Article 37.07, § 3(g),2 requires the State to give pretrial notice of “same-transaction contextual evidence” that it intends to offer in the punishment stage of a non-capital trial. We conclude that it does not. Building upon our prior opinion in Jaubert v. State,3 we hold that Article 37.07, § 3(g), which explicitly states that the notice requirement applies “in the same manner required by Rule 404(b),” refers to the scope of the evidence offered as well as to the timing of the evidence offered.4 Therefore, because pretrial notice of “same-transaction contextual evidence” is not required under Rule 404(b), it is also not required under Article 37.07, § 3(g). We affirm the court of appeals, which had, in essence, held the same.5

A. Facts

Appellant pled guilty to two counts of sexual assault of a child under the age of seventeen and requested that a jury assess punishment. The jury heard that appellant and his then-wife, Sherry Worthy, took fourteen-year-old R.T. into their Brownwood home. R.T.’s mother had died, and her father was in prison. R.T. was a friend of appellant’s daughter, Candice, and it was Candice who asked her parents to let R.T. live with them. R.T. was dropped off by two of her aunts with a single sack of clothes. Appellant and his wife provided for R.T. and gave her new clothes, her own room, and “more material things” than she had ever had. After R.T. told appellant she wanted to be a pilot, he took her up in a private plane.

Within a few months, appellant’s rough housing with R.T. became sexual in nature. They carried on a secret affair in the family home. About once a week, appellant would walk out of the front door and then sneak back in through R.T.’s bedroom window and have sex with her. Eventually, Sherry Worthy realized something nefarious was going on, and she kicked both her husband and R.T. out of the house. Sherry later divorced appellant.

[36]*36Appellant and R.T. then spent a couple of nights at motels, first in Comanche, then in Stephenville. Next, R.T. moved in with the Russells — a family who had previously taken in her twin sister. Appellant, meanwhile, moved in with his step-brother, Claude Sellers.

Over appellant’s objections, the jury heard that Sellers was himself a registered sex offender. While living with the Rus-sells, R.T. would pretend to spend the night with her girlfriend, Hannah, because Hannah lived close to Sellers’s apartment. Appellant would pick her up, and they would have sex at Sellers’s apartment. Appellant testified that he knew that taking R.T. to that apartment was a violation of his step-brother’s community supervision, but he said that he “took precautions.” Appellant explained that he used a separate entrance to the apartment and installed a padlock on his door so that Sellers “had no access to my room and he had no knowledge of what was going on.”

After a few weeks, R.T. and her sister went to live with their Aunt Christy in Santo, Texas. Appellant moved into a camper at the house for about a month. When Aunt Christy found out that R.T. and appellant still had a romantic relationship, she took R.T. to the police. In all, the sexual liaison lasted about nine months.

R.T., who was nineteen at the time of trial, testified that she had been in love with appellant, and he with her. R.T. told the jury, “I just don’t want anything to happen to him. That’s it.” Nonetheless, the jury sentenced appellant to eight years in prison on each count.

B. Direct Appeal

In the court of appeals, appellant argued that the trial court erred in admitting evidence that his step-brother was a registered sex offender because the State failed to give pretrial notice of its intent to offer that evidence.6 The State had provided a document entitled “Notice of Intent to Offer Evidence of Prior Convictions and Extraneous Offenses” which listed (1) sexual offenses against R.T. that took place in Comanche and Erath Counties,7 (2) a threat appellant made against R.T., and (3) appellant’s admission that he had an ongoing sexual relationship with R.T. for several months. This admission encompassed the time period appellant lived with his step-brother, although Sellers is not explicitly named in the State’s notice.8

The court of appeals rejected appellant’s argument, holding that the evidence was same-transaction contextual evidence rather than extraneous-offense evidence:

The evidence that Worthy, in committing the offense for which he was charged, violated the conditions of his [37]*37stepbrother’s community supervision that an unsupervised child under seventeen not be at his place of residence— showing his disregard for conditions of community supervision and placing the complainant in jeopardy — is part of the context of the crime for which he was being tried and is not an extraneous bad act. Consequently, the State’s introduction of this evidence was not in violation of the trial court’s order, which only related to extraneous bad acts. As the State notes, the trial court appears to have been under the impression that the evidence was not contextual and was subject to the notice requirement and that adequate notice had been given. Because the evidence related to the context of the offense for which he was charged and not conduct that was extraneous to his commission of that offense, we conclude that the trial court was in error in its reasoning. We reject the assumption in Worthy’s arguments that this evidence consists of extraneous bad acts.9

Appellant asks this Court to resolve a conflict in the courts of appeals about whether Article 37.07, § S(g)’s notice requirement encompasses same-transaction contextual evidence. The Eastland (in this case) and Austin courts10 have held that it does not, while the Beaumont court has held that it does.11 We agree with the Eastland and Austin courts.

C. Article 37.07, § 3(g)’s notice requirement does not encompass same-transaction contextual evidence.

In discussing the admission of evidence during the punishment phase of a non-capital trial, Article 37.07, § 3(g) states, “On timely request of the defendant, notice of intent to introduce evidence under this article shall be given in the same manner required by Rule 404(b), Texas Rules of Evidence,” and then refers to an “extraneous crime or bad act.”12 Rule 404(b), in turn, provides that, in certain circumstances, “[ejvidence of other crimes, wrongs or acts” may be admissible “provided that upon timely request by the accused in a criminal case, reasonable notice is given in advance of trial of intent to introduce in the State’s case-in-chief such evidence other than that arising in the same transaction.”13 The question here, as in our prior Jaubert

Free access — add to your briefcase to read the full text and ask questions with AI

Related

The State of Texas v. Willie Thomas Stobaugh
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2025
Yahel Eliyah McDaniel v. the State of Texas
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2024
Rolando Mendoza v. the State of Texas
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2024
Fabian Andres Ortega v. the State of Texas
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2024
Kevin Debnam v. the State of Texas
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2023
Jose Antonio Nasipak v. the State of Texas
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2022
Esteban Villa Rusher v. the State of Texas
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2022
Dustin Chance Reynolds v. the State of Texas
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2022
Marcus Gardner v. the State of Texas
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2021
Veronica Ann Arroyo v. State
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2020
Eric Jamal Johnson v. State
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2019
Donald Foster v. State
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2018
John Micheal McBride v. State
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2018
Raul Requena-Castaneda v. State
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2018
Rodriguez v. State
546 S.W.3d 843 (Court of Appeals of Texas, 2018)
Quincy Niegbe Davis v. State
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2017
Jorge Ortega v. State
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2016
Bruce Wayne Harkey v. State
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2015
Bryan Champion v. State
Court of Appeals of Texas, 2015

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
312 S.W.3d 34, 2010 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 686, 2010 WL 2292303, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/worthy-v-state-texcrimapp-2010.