15th Court of Appeals
Paxton v. Garza, et al.
No. 15-25-00116-CV 12/30/25
Issue:
Does Texas Gov’t Code §41.006 give authority to the Attorney General to establish a rule requiring local prosecutors in Texas’s most populated counties to prepare and produce reports containing multiple categories of information regarding criminal matters?
Holding:
No. Section 41.006 does not confer rulemaking authority on the Attorney General, and the trial court appropriately entered a temporary injunction enjoining enforcement of the Rules against the prosecutors who applied for the temporary injunction. The rules found to be invalid specified 12 categories of required information for initial and quarterly reports, an additional five categories of information for annual reports (including internal policies, operating procedures, and funds received through asset forfeiture, foundations, or associations), and created an Oversight Advisory Committee that would have had power to request entire case files. Noncompliance with the Rules would have been considered official misconduct under Local Gov’t Code §87.011 and would have permitted the Attorney General to file a petition for quo warranto to remove a county or district attorney from office. The Court concluded that §41.006 does not expressly grant rulemaking authority—“especially in light of the language used in countless other statutes in which the Legislature did expressly grant rulemaking authority to the Attorney General.” Read opinion.
Concurrence (Brister, J.):
“I agree that the absence in Government Code §41.006 of any express rule-making authority for the attorney general—coupled with dozens of statutes where the Legislature has explicitly granted such authority in other contexts—makes it highly unlikely that the Legislature intended to grant that authority here” (footnote omitted). The concurrence noted that the Attorney General’s response was that the other rule-making statutes were enacted during the last 35 years while §41.006 was enacted in 1879. “But if that were the whole story, it is odd that no attorney general for almost 150 years ever thought to adopt rules like those before us, despite regularly adopting hundreds of rules in dozens of other contexts over several decades. But I would add that the text of §41.006, while it likely authorizes the attorney general to request some of the information at issue on an individual basis, does not authorize the same by statewide rules. The text of §41.006 requires prosecutors to report information ‘that the attorney general desires’ and ‘at the times and in the form that the attorney general directs.’ ‘Desire’ in this context generally means ‘to express a wish for: request.’ That would contemplate specific requests to specific prosecutors regarding specific criminal matters. This text does not easily encompass the general, permanent, mandatory, across-the-board reports that the proposed rules require, unless we assume all attorneys general always ‘desire’ such information ‘at the times’ the rules perpetually require.” Read concurrence.
Commentary:
To date, a Travis County trial court and a statewide (all-Republican) appellate court have sided with the local prosecutors objecting to the Attorney General’s creative attempt to impose on them unprecedented and onerous reporting duties not explicitly authorized by law. The 15th Court side-stepped the potential constitutional issue raised by an executive branch agency attempting to oversee or control the operations of judicial branch offices and instead resolved this initial dispute on more basic administrative law grounds. Barring appeal by the agency, the matter now returns to the trial court for further proceedings consistent with the opinion.
This decision may not seem noteworthy to most prosecutors, who are busy with the day-to-day business of seeing that justice is done. But it certainly will be significant to the elected prosecutors who pursued this injunction and their upper management, who now have a reprieve from the oppressive burden of compiling and sending potentially massive amounts of case information to the Attorney General on matters historically—and constitutionally— left to the discretion of local prosecutors.
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
Hernandez v. State
No. PD-0176-25 12/19/25
Issue:
Was an officer’s detention of the defendant lawful to support a conviction for evading arrest when a 911 caller reported “a suspicious four-door Chevrolet Silverado driving at a slow speed” and the officer stopped the defendant, who was driving a different make and model of pickup on a dirt road?
Holding:
No. The evidence did not support the officer’s stop of the defendant. “[D]riving a truck slowly on a dirt road at night is not on its own suggestive of criminal activity,” the defendant’s driving did not violate any law, the officer arrived on the scene 30 minutes after the 911 call, and the truck was not of the make and model described by the 911 caller. “To the extent that the State relies on Officer Garcia’s personal knowledge that this particular area was known for human trafficking, that argument is not persuasive. If that were sufficient, any vehicle driving slowly in an area with known activity of human trafficking could be detained on suspicion that the vehicle was engaged in human trafficking.” Read opinion.
Concurrence (McClure, J.):
Judge McClure pointed out in Penal Code §38.04(a) (evading arrest or detention), the lawfulness of a detention or arrest is an element of the offense, rather than an issue left to the judge to decide. Because of this, the lawfulness of a detention cannot be brought up in a pretrial suppression motion in an evading case because it is an element, and a defendant charged with evading will never be entitled to an Article 38.23 instruction. “In other words, I would encourage trial judges to take extra care when determining the sufficiency of the evidence regarding the ‘lawful detention’ element, and to define the ‘rational juror’ as someone with a basic understanding of the applicable law. This is not an ideal remedy, but it is the most workable option.” Read concurrence.
Dissent (Schenck, P.J.):
“I believe that the evidence is more than sufficient to show that Deputy Garcia has reasonable suspicion for the initial traffic stop. Alternatively, I conclude a jury might have reasonably found the community caretaking doctrine applicable to the initial stop. Either conclusion would compel affirmance here.” Read dissent.
Dissent (Yeary, J.):
“The appropriate standard of review requires the consideration of all the evidence in light most favorable to the jury’s verdict—not each piece of evidence evaluated individually and in a light most likely to undermine the jury’s verdict.” Read dissent.
Dissent (Parker, J., joined by Yeary, J.):
“Officer Garcia was an experienced officer who received a call late at night. He did not see any other vehicles on the road for miles until he saw [the defendant] on a dirt road very close to the caller’s home. [The defendant’s] vehicle matched the general description of a four-door pickup truck in an area that had ‘a lot of’ incidences of human smuggling in that area ‘at that time.’ The totality of the circumstances also could have objectively indicated an imminent trespass.” Read dissent.
Commentary:
911 callers and other tipsters sometimes relay only general or vague descriptions of persons or vehicles that are potentially involved in criminal activity. Although the combination of the caller/tipster’s information, the officer’s training and experience, and the officer’s observations of the identified person or vehicle often suffices to establish reasonable suspicion for a lawful detention, this case provides an example of when more is needed to demonstrate why the particular person or vehicle is suspicious. If you encounter a similar issue, let this opinion serve as a reminder to encourage the officer to be as thorough as possible when describing the suspicious nature of a person or vehicle at issue, including details that link the person or vehicle with the criminal activity that the officer suspects may be afoot.
Texas Courts of Appeals
Taylor v. State
No. 07-25-00010-CR 12/30/25
Issue:
When an elevator door opens to reveal a man holding a knife who turns toward officers and advances, may an officer reasonably believe deadly force is necessary to prevent an imminent death?
Holding:
Yes. The Court reversed the defendant-officer’s conviction for deadly conduct and ordered an acquittal. The Court agreed with the defendant that the evidence was insufficient for the State to disprove his affirmative defense of justification beyond a reasonable doubt and found the officer’s conduct was justified because he acted in self-defense or defense of a third person. “The question before us is not whether different tactical decisions could have been made, nor whether this tragic encounter might have ended differently. The question is whether, viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict, the State met its burden of persuading the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that [the defendant] did not reasonably believe deadly force was immediately necessary at the moment he fired his weapon.” Read opinion.
Commentary:
Although the jury could have believed the defense’s evidence and concluded that the defendant, a former Austin police officer, reasonably believed that deadly force was immediately necessary to protect the defendant or others from the complainant’s imminent use or attempted use of unlawful deadly force, the jury did not. Instead, the jury rejected the defendant’s justification theories and convicted the defendant of deadly conduct. By finding the evidence legally insufficient on that account, the appellate court seems to have acted as a “thirteenth” juror, substituting its own determinations for those of the jury, rather than assessing, in the light most favorable to the jury’s verdict, whether any rational factfinder could have found beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act in justifiable self-defense or defense of others. The appellate court also seems to over-emphasize the defendant’s subjective beliefs concerning the complainant’s use or attempted use of unlawful deadly force, while minimizing the objective component of the self-defense and defense-of-others justifications—i.e., whether the defendant’s subjective beliefs were objectively reasonable, measured by the objective standard of an ordinary and prudent person in the same circumstances as the actor. If the State pursues a petition for discretionary review in the Court of Criminal Appeals and the Court grants review, we’ll see where that higher judicial authority lands on the matter.
Hrehocik v. State
No. 03-25-00126-CR 12/31/25
Issue:
Can a person be considered the owner of a phone even if there is evidence that the person is not listed as the owner in the service account and that someone else pays for the phone and for cellular service?
Holding:
Yes. In this domestic violence case, even though the defendant purchased the phone and paid the bills for it, based on the victim’s testimony that the defendant had given the phone to her, the trial court could have reasonably resolved conflicts in the evidence by finding that the victim “had the greater possessory right” to the phone. Therefore, the trial court correctly denied the defendant’s motion to suppress evidence of a recording on the phone because he failed to meet his burden of establishing that the victim committed theft of the phone or unlawfully accessed the phone’s contents to allow the police to view it. Read opinion.
Commentary:
This opinion should be useful to prosecutors who work with domestic violence cases because circumstances like these are common—i.e., where the defendant (often the male husband or partner) has full or at least primary control of the household finances, including paying for the complainant’s cellphone or other electronic devices. If you encounter a case like this one, follow the prosecution’s example here and make a thorough record demonstrating the complainant’s greater right to possession of the electronic device at issue—e.g., physical possession of the device, knowledge of the device’s passcode, routine use of the device, evidence that the defendant gave the device to the complainant as a gift, etc.
Morales-Gomez v. State
No. 14-24-00543-CR 12/18/25
Issue:
Was the Court of Criminal Appeals’ decision in Ex parte Roark, 707 S.W.3d 157 (Tex. Crim. App. 2024), a repudiation of shaken baby syndrome evidence?
Holding:
No. The Court found the evidence sufficient and upheld the defendant’s conviction for felony murder. “Roarkwas not a wholesale repudiation of … shaken baby syndrome, but rather a context dependent reexamination of certain scientific opinions concerning the cause of a child’s injury and their likely affect (sic) on the jury’s verdict.” The Court discussed differences between the facts in this case and Roark at length, including that the child’s injuries in this case included not just internal brain and retinal injuries that could have been caused by a spontaneous rebleed or accidental fall, but also extensive bruising and abrasions in different stages, bite marks, broken teeth, and bone fractures. “Most of the testimony at trial focused on these external injuries. Therefore, we decline to exclude from our sufficiency review any evidence attributing the victim’s injuries to shaking.” Read opinion.
Commentary:
The Fourteenth Court of Appeals here correctly notes that the Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) did not hold in Roark that shaken baby syndrome (SBS) is “junk science” or that evidence of shaking cannot be admitted to help explain the source and nature of a child-victim’s brain trauma and other injuries. Rather, as this case demonstrates, the State can still proffer evidence of shaking to show that it was a possible, contributing cause of the child-victim’s injuries, so long as the State does not present a theory that SBS and only SBS is the definite cause of internal brain trauma. This opinion is consistent with how the CCA and other intermediate appellate courts have interpreted Roark in subsequent cases, so it should hold up if the defendant seeks and attains discretionary review by the CCA.
DPS Crime Laboratory QI Notice
The Department of Public Safety’s Crime Laboratory Division recently posted a Quality Incident notification update on their website that is related to a forensic science presentation offered at last month’s Elected Prosecutor Conference in San Antonio. For questions, please follow up with that agency.