Day v. State

614 S.W.3d 121

Jonathan William DAY, Appellant

v.The STATE of Texas

NO. PD-0955-19

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.

Delivered: December 16, 2020

Emily Johnson-Liu, for State/Appellant.

Robert K. Gill, for Appellant.

Newell, J., delivered the opinion of the unanimous Court.

Appellant Jonathan Day fled after being told that he was under arrest and that there was an active arrest warrant out for him. He was charged with and convicted of evading arrest or detention. That offense requires intentional flight from an officer "attempting lawfully to arrest or detain."¹ The court of appeals found the evidence insufficient to prove that the attempted arrest or detention was "lawful." It held that while Appellant's initial detention may have been justified, his continued detention, during which Appellant fled after police discovered an outstanding arrest warrant for him, was not. The court of appeals reversed the conviction and ordered an acquittal.² We reverse the court of appeals judgment because a jury could rationally find the officer's attempted arrest or detention was lawful in light of the outstanding warrant.

Offense

Richland Hills City Marshal C.W. Heizer was waiting in his truck three houses south of a residence where he planned to serve a traffic warrant on Danny Branton. However, he didn't know what Danny Branton looked like. Around 8:45 in the morning, Heizer spotted two vehicles and two bicycles pull up in the driveway of the residence. Six people had arrived: Appellant, who had driven up in a white SUV with no passengers; Mr. Acorn, who had pulled in behind Appellant in a gold truck with two passengers (Danny Branton in the front, and a female, Ms. Curlee, in the back); and the two cyclists, one of whom was later identified as a Mr. Kuhl.

Appellant got out of the SUV and was talking to Mr. Kuhl, but nobody got out of the gold truck, which had its windows rolled down. Heizer, in his uniform and with his body camera on, approached the group on foot and asked where Danny Branton was. Nobody responded. When Mr. Acorn started to back his truck out, Heizer stopped him and told everybody that he needed to see their identifications. Only Appellant and Mr. Kuhl handed Heizer identification.

Two people left the scene without giving identification: the other cyclist and Danny Branton, who got out of the truck and went inside the house before Heizer could stop him. Mr. Acorn and Ms. Curlee stayed in the truck and wrote down their information for Heizer. Heizer felt at this point he was investigating the offense of "hindering apprehension," and he proceeded to identify everyone and check for warrants.

Appellant told Heizer that he needed to go to work and wanted to leave, explaining that he was not Danny Branton. Heizer responded to wait a few minutes so that he could find out who everybody was. Appellant ultimately admitted to Heizer that he had warrants out of Fort Worth, but Heizer indicated he was "not interested in Fort Worth." Heizer then called in the information for the four remaining individuals to dispatch; all four had warrants. The license check revealed that Appellant had a warrant for a jailable offense out of Haltom City in Tarrant County.

When Appellant realized that Heizer was going to arrest him on the county-level warrant, he turned around and started walking towards the white SUV. Appellant told Heizer he needed to make a phone call. Heizer responded that it was okay, but that Appellant should stay there and not go anywhere else. Appellant then reached into the SUV, rolled up the driver's side window, locked the door, shut the door, and then went around the front of the SUV. Heizer told him, "You can't leave, you're under arrest." Appellant stated, "I'm not leaving." But, he was. He continued walking away and soon broke out into a run. He was caught about three blocks away.

Trial

The State charged Appellant with evading arrest or detention.³ He filed a motion to suppress all evidence obtained after Heizer found out that Appellant was not Danny Branton. At the hearing on the motion to suppress, counsel argued that the trial court should suppress anything after the point Appellant said "I want to go, I need to be at work" because from that point on the continued detention was illegal. The trial court denied the motion, stating that "the objective facts were that [Heizer] did see the car drive up or see the truck drive up" and that the short time he held Appellant was not unreasonable. The court told defense counsel that he could get an Article 38.23 instruction at trial if the issue were raised again.

At the close of evidence, defense counsel re-urged his motion to suppress based on the "illegal detention" and the trial court denied it, explaining that Heizer did have some facts that would allow him to detain Appellant regardless of Heizer's subjective state of mind. Counsel moved for a directed verdict on the ground that the State had failed to prove Appellant was fleeing a lawful detention or arrest. The trial court denied the motion because it was up to the jury to decide whether the State had proven Appellant was being lawfully detained or arrested.

Counsel asked for an Article 38.23 instruction. Under both the Article 38.23 instruction and the application paragraph in the jury charge, the jury was instructed to acquit Appellant if it found that Heizer's detention or attempt at detention was unlawful. Under the Article 38.23 instruction, the jury was instructed to disregard evidence of the warrant and the flight if it believed that the prolonged detention was unlawful, which would necessarily merit a "not guilty" verdict. Under the application paragraph, the jury could consider the evidence of the warrant and the flight, but it was instructed to find Appellant not guilty if it believed that the Appellant's flight was from an unlawful attempt to detain him. The jury found Appellant guilty, and the trial court assessed Appellant's punishment at 220 days in county jail.

Appeal

On direct appeal, Appellant acknowledged that this Court, in Woods v. State , held that a pretrial motion to suppress is not a proper way to challenge the legality of an arrest in a prosecution for evading arrest because the "lawful detention" portion of the statute is an element of the offense.⁴ Rather, when a lawful detention is an element of the crime, a failure of the State to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the detention was lawful must result in an acquittal of the defendant. So, Appellant argued that he was entitled to an acquittal based upon insufficient evidence. In so doing, he argued that his detention was "unlawful, irrespective of the later discovery of the warrant."⁵

The court of appeals agreed, holding that the detention should have ended once Heizer determined that Appellant was not Branton.⁶ The court also agreed with Appellant that the later discovery of his warrant did not change the character of the detention.⁷ The court held that the evidence was insufficient to establish that Appellant's detention was lawful.⁸ Implicit in this holding is the conclusion that the unreasonably prolonged detention tainted the subsequent discovery of the arrest warrant. And, without the discovery of the warrant, Appellant fled an illegal detention. The appellate court reversed the trial court's judgment of conviction and rendered a judgment of acquittal.⁹

We granted the State Prosecuting Attorney's petition to address three issues.¹⁰ First, can the officer's attempt to detain or arrest a suspect, which is otherwise lawful, be tainted by an earlier illegality and thereby negate the lawful-arrest-or-detention element of evading, just as evidence is tainted under fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree?

Second, and perhaps alternatively, will discovery of a valid arrest warrant necessarily render an attempted seizure on the warrant "lawful" (despite an earlier illegality) for purposes of evading arrest? Third, and finally, if an earlier illegality can taint the officer's attempted detention, does discovery of a warrant provide an independent source for the detention or attenuate the taint?

The answer to the first question is "no." We are not dealing with a suppression of evidence issue; we are dealing with a sufficiency of the evidence issue. Evidentiary exclusionary rules serve a completely different purpose than the evading arrest or detention statute. The former deals with the penalty designed to deter future police misconduct,¹¹ while the latter punishes a person who flees lawful police conduct. Doctrines such as "the fruit of the poisonous tree", "attenuation of the taint", and "the independent source doctrine" go to the question of whether evidence may be introduced at trial; they do not render otherwise lawful police conduct unlawful.¹² In light of the answer to the SPA's first issue, there is no need to address the second or third issues, and we dismiss them as improvidently granted.¹³

Standard of Review

Legal sufficiency requires that a rational jury could find each essential element of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt.¹⁴ In a sufficiency review, the essential elements of the offense are those of a hypothetically correct jury charge for the case.¹⁵ The hypothetically correct jury charge is one that accurately sets out the law and adequately describes the offense for which the defendant was tried without increasing the State's burden of proof or restricting the State's theories of liability.¹⁶ When reviewing the sufficiency of the evidence, we consider all the admitted evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict.¹⁷ The jury is the sole judge of the credibility of a witness's testimony and the weight to assign to that testimony.¹⁸ This means that the jury can believe all, some, or none of a witness's testimony.¹⁹

In some cases, however, legal sufficiency turns upon the meaning of the statute under which the defendant is being prosecuted.²⁰ We ask if certain conduct actually constitutes an offense under the statute.²¹ When...