Dallas Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog

April 16, 2022

Texas Court Denies Defendant’s Appeal in Drug Case

In a recent opinion coming out of a Texas court, the defendant argued that a lower court had unreasonably denied his motion to suppress incriminating evidence. After considering the appeal, the higher court affirmed that the evidence was properly admitted, and the defendant’s appeal was denied.

Facts of the Case

According to the opinion, two police officers were on duty when they received a call about a fight happening in a Family Dollar parking lot. The manager of the store had called the police to notify them of a man and woman arguing outside the entrance; during the call, the manager provided a description of the man’s vehicle as well as the direction he left the parking lot.

The officers responding to the call searched for a vehicle matching the manager’s description and quickly found a car of the same make and model. The officers initiated a traffic stop by pulling over the car, which was occupied by the defendant in this case. The defendant began speaking with the officers, immediately admitting that he had been involved in the Family Dollar altercation.

March 17, 2022

Texas Court Agrees with Lower Court and Rules in Favor of Defendant in Drug Case, Suppressing Incriminating Evidence

by Robert Guest

In a recent drug case coming out of a Texas court, the higher court agreed with a lower court’s ruling that incriminating evidence should have been suppressed. Originally, the defendant in the case was charged with marijuana possession, but he filed a motion to suppress the drugs because he did not give officers voluntary consent to search his home. The lower court agreed and accepted the defendant’s motion to suppress. When the State of Texas appealed this decision, the higher court kept the original ruling in place and suppressed the incriminating evidence.

The Facts of the Case

According to the opinion, the defendant in this case was out of town when his ex-wife called the police to report that there was marijuana in his house. She told the police that she was at the defendant’s house to pick up her minor son, but in reality, she already had her son with her and it was not a scheduled pick-up day.

Two officers went to the defendant’s home and found a small attached garage and greenhouse. As they walked towards the garage, the officers smelled marijuana. They looked through the window of the greenhouse and saw what they thought were marijuana plants. The officers called the defendant and said to him that they located his marijuana and would cause property damage if he did not consent to their search of the home.

March 9, 2022

Texas Court Denies Defendant’s Appeal in Drug Case

by Robert Guest

In a recent drug case coming out of a Texas court, the defendant’s challenge to a lower court’s ruling was denied. The defendant took issue with the fact that the lower court denied her motion to suppress incriminating evidence, evidence that ultimately led to her conviction for possession of a controlled substance. Despite the defendant’s argument that the lower court improperly denied this motion to suppress, her appeal was ultimately denied.

Facts of the Case

According to the opinion, the police officer involved in this case was posted in the parking lot of a Family Dollar store with the purpose of making sure people leaving the store arrived safely to their cars. The store’s employees had also asked the officer to tell the driver of a vehicle that had been parking in the store’s lot overnight to stop parking there.

A vehicle matching the employees’ description approached the parking lot, but then the driver changed course upon seeing the officer and drove away. The officer contacted dispatch and recognized the driver’s name as someone he had previously charged with drug possession. The officer followed the driver, who later became the defendant in this case. The defendant turned into a Dairy Queen parking lot, turned out her car’s lights, and eventually returned to the Family Dollar parking lot.

February 28, 2022

Texas Court Denies Appeal in Murder Case, Despite Defendant’s “Sudden Passion” Argument

by Robert Guest

In a recent murder case involving a man and his wife, the defendant’s appeal to a district court in Texas was unsuccessful. Originally, the defendant was convicted for murder after he drove up to his wife’s place of work and shot her. He appealed, arguing the crime was a crime of passion and thus that he should not have been so severely punished. The court rejected the defendant’s argument and affirmed his conviction.

Facts of the Case

According to the opinion, the defendant had gotten in a fight with his wife because she had been living in a separate apartment with the couple’s adult son. The defendant was unhappy that she needed space away from him, and he felt as though he was choosing their son over him. Subsequently, the defendant became depressed.

While experiencing this sense of depression, the defendant drove to the assisted living facility where his wife worked and waited for about an hour for her to arrive for her shift. He then “freaked out”, took a gun out of the back of his truck, and killed his wife. He drove home then immediately went to a local police station to turn himself in. According to the defendant’s report at the police station, the shooting was an accident and was not pre-meditated.

February 8, 2022

Texas Court Affirms Guilty Verdict in PCP Case

by Robert Guest

In a recent drug case in Texas, the court denied the defendant’s motion to suppress incriminating evidence. Originally charged with possession of PCP, the defendant appealed his guilty verdict by arguing that the court should not have denied his motion to suppress evidence. The higher court rejected the defendant’s argument, affirming the original verdict in his case.

Facts of the Case

According to the opinion, a police officer in Texas somehow obtained information about a planned gang shooting that was supposed to happen in the near future. The officer learned that one member of the gang was en route to pick up guns from a private residence, so the officer immediately went to the house to see if he could see any suspicious activity. At some point during that surveillance, the officer saw the defendant drive up to the house, stop briefly, then drive away.

After following the car for a few minutes, the officer saw the defendant turn without signaling. The officer and his partner put on their lights to initiate a traffic stop. The defendant began driving slowly for about a minute before he finally pulled over – the officers suspected this was so he could hide the guns he had just taken from the house. When the officers were able to approach the stopped vehicle, they smelled marijuana. They then searched the car and the defendant himself, finding a bag of marijuana as well as a bottle of PCP in the defendant’s pants. The defendant was later found guilty of possession of PCP weighing more than 4 and less than 200 grams.

January 18, 2022

Texas Court Denies Defendant’s Motion to Suppress in Recent Homicide Case

by Robert Guest

In a recent opinion from a Texas court, the defendant’s motion to suppress was denied. Originally, the defendant was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and aggravated assault. He appealed, arguing that the prosecutor’s use of evidence from the black box in his car was unwarranted. The court disagreed, sustaining the original verdict.

The Facts of the Case

According to the opinion, the defendant was driving one of his friends when he sped around a curve and lost control of his car. Immediately, the defendant crashed into a tree, and his friend died due to injuries sustained in the crash. Investigating the case, police officers obtained a search warrant to recover the defendant’s black box event data recorder. According to police officers, this black box would tell them important information on the car’s speed both at and before the crash itself.

While preparing for trial, the defendant argued that the officers should not have been allowed to seize the car’s black box – it was a violation of his right to privacy. The trial court denied this motion and proceeded with trial. Eventually, a jury heard all of the evidence and concluded that the defendant was guilty of homicide and aggravated assault because of his reckless driving.

January 10, 2022

Texas Court Sides with Defendant on Motion to Suppress Incriminating Evidence

by Robert Guest

In a recent opinion from a Texas court, the defendant successfully argued that his motion to suppress should have been granted. Originally, the defendant was pulled over in a traffic stop, and the officer pulling him over arrested him for driving under the influence. When the defendant filed a motion to suppress the incriminating evidence proving he was intoxicated, the court at first denied this motion. Later, though, a higher court agreed with the defendant, finding that the evidence should have been suppressed in the first place.

The Facts of the Case

According to the opinion, an officer was patrolling the roads one evening when he stopped the defendant’s vehicle for failing to maintain a single line of traffic. In the officer’s testimony, he stated that the only reason he stopped the defendant’s car was for this one reason – there were no other factors that went into his decision to pull the defendant over.

During the traffic stop, the officer saw that the defendant appeared to be intoxicated. He arrested the defendant for driving while intoxicated, and the defendant soon after filed a motion to suppress the evidence of his intoxication. The defendant argued that the officer did not have reasonable suspicion to pull him over in the first place, and since the officer should not have initiated the traffic stop, the subsequent evidence of intoxication was unfairly included in the State’s case. The court denied this motion to suppress, and later the defendant pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated. Continue reading

December 31, 2021

Texas Supreme Court Reverses Drug Conviction After Illegal Search

by Robert Guest

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects residents from unreasonable search and seizure of their property by law enforcement. The legal remedy for a defendant whose constitutional rights are violated in this context is the exclusion of any evidence found in such a search from their criminal prosecution. Although this rule seems straightforward and beneficial to Americans who are accused of crimes, prosecutors and law enforcement agencies are known to violate this rule and usually do all they can to admit evidence collected as a result of illegal searches. A Texas appellate court recently reversed a lower court decision allowing evidence to be admitted against a drug defendant that had come from an illegal search.

In the recently decided case, the defendant was stopped by an officer for operating a motor vehicle without registration tags. According to the facts discussed in the appellate opinion, the defendant stopped his vehicle in a well-lit area near a gas station and was outside of the vehicle when the officer approached him. After making contact with the defendant, the officer requested that he put his hands behind his back so he could perform a “pat down” for weapons. As the officer attempted to put his hands inside one of the defendant’s pockets, the defendant began to resist, breaking free from the officer and fleeing behind a dumpster. The officer followed the defendant, placing him under arrest and finding a small bag of drugs on the ground, which was presumably dropped by the defendant after he was out of the officer’s line of sight.

The defendant was arrested and charged for drug possession. Before trial, the defendant challenged the admission of the drug evidence against him, arguing that he did not consent to a search and that the officer did not have reasonable suspicion to reach into his pocket during the pat down. The prosecution claimed that the search was legal and consented to by the defendant, and even if it was an illegal search that the defendant’s own conduct in fleeing from the officer and throwing the drugs on the ground himself meant that the evidence was not found in the course of the search. The trial court accepted the prosecution’s arguments and ultimately convicted the defendant and sentenced him to 5 years of incarceration.

December 18, 2021

Court Denies Defendant’s Motion to Suppress in Recent Appeal from Texas Murder Conviction

by Robert Guest

In a recent opinion from a Texas court, a defendant’s request to suppress incriminating evidence was denied. The defendant had been previously found guilty of murder, and part of the evidence used against him in court was gunshot residue (sometimes called GSR) found in his vehicle. The defendant tried to argue that the GSR was improperly used as evidence because the detective who found the GSR did not obtain a warrant, specifically stating that he was going to be searching for GSR in the vehicle. The court denied this argument, affirming the lower court’s judgment and denying the defendant’s appeal.

The Facts of the Case

According to the opinion, a shooting occurred one morning in January 2018 outside of the victim’s apartment complex. The victim’s wife heard gunshots and found her husband dead outside of their apartment, but the shooter ran away before she was able to see him.

The defendant quickly became the main suspect in the police department’s investigation of the crime. Other apartment complex residents described the shooter and the shooter’s vehicle to detectives, which led investigators to the defendant himself. There was also testimonial evidence presented that the defendant and the victim had been arguing at work the day before the shooting, which gave detectives reason to believe the defendant had a motive to commit the crime. Other witnesses told police officers that before he lost consciousness, the victim had been uttering a name to people around him that sounded like the defendant’s first name.

November 23, 2021

Dallas Appellate Court Finds the Texas Stalking Statute Unconstitutional

by Robert Guest

Recently, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth District of Texas at Dallas issued an important decision holding the state’s stalking statute unconstitutional. While lawmakers are responsible for writing and passing laws, courts must interpret the laws as they are written. However, courts are also the final arbiter in determining whether a law is constitutional. While most laws pass constitutional muster, some do not, as evidenced by the court’s recent decision.

The Facts of the Case

The defendant in the case was arrested and charged with felony stalking for conduct taking place between January 1, 2007, and April 24, 2018. More specifically, the complaint alleged that the defendant engaged in conduct that caused the complaining witness “to feel harassed, annoyed, alarmed, abused, tormented, embarrassed, or offended” and “would cause a reasonable person to feel harassed, annoyed, alarmed, abused, tormented, embarrassed, or offended.” Evidently, the defendant posted comments on social media and made other public statements that the complaining witness considered threatening.

At the time, the Texas stalking statute made it a crime to commit more than one act of “electronic-communications harassment” under § 42.07. That statute provides that a person repeatedly sends “electronic communications in a manner reasonably likely to harass, annoy, alarm, abuse, torment, embarrass, or offend another.” Thus, the stalking statute directly references the harassment statute, making it a stalking offense to engage in a continued course of harassment.