Salas v. State

CHARLES SALAS JR., Appellant v. THE STATE OF TEXAS

No. 02-20-00028-CR

Court of Appeals Second Appellate District of Texas at Fort Worth

October 29, 2020

On Appeal from the 431st District Court Denton County, Texas

Trial Court No. F18-3564-431

Before Gabriel, Kerr, and Bassel, JJ.

Memorandum Opinion by Justice Gabriel MEMORANDUM OPINION

Appellant Charles Salas Jr. appeals from his conviction for assault against a family or household member and from his enhanced sixty-year sentence. Salas challenges the sufficiency of the evidence to justify the jury's rejection of his justification defense of self-defense; however, the evidence, which included the victim's statements to the police immediately after the offense and the nature of his injuries, allowed a rational fact-finder to reasonably determine that Salas had committed assault and had not acted in self-defense. Salas also argues that the trial court abused its discretion by admitting a video of Salas's commentary while he was being transported to jail because it constituted inadmissible character-conformity evidence. Because Salas's relevance objection at trial did not preserve his appellate argument based on character conformity, we do not address the merits of this issue. Finally, Salas argues that his sentence is constitutionally disproportionate to the nature of the offense; however, he has procedurally defaulted this complaint by failing to bring it to the attention of the trial court. Therefore, we affirm the trial court's judgment.

I. BACKGROUND

Salas lived with his father (Charles Sr.), mother (Sandra), and nephew (Jesse). One night, Salas and Charles Sr. began arguing about Salas's girlfriend. Sandra and Charles Sr. asked Salas to leave the home. Salas walked out the front door, and Charles Sr. followed him out. Jesse heard arguing and went outside to see what washappening. Salas hit Charles Sr., and Jesse stepped between the two. Salas then hit Jesse twice in the face, causing Jesse to fall back. Salas left.

Sandra called 911 and told the dispatcher that Salas had hit Charles Sr. and had pushed Charles Sr. and Jesse down. She also gave the dispatcher a description of Salas. Officer Niko Bookman responded to the call and located Salas while driving to the scene. Salas told Bookman that Charles Sr. and Jesse "had jumped on him." Salas, who was not wearing a shirt, had no injuries. Bookman placed Salas in the back of his patrol car and drove to Salas's home.

When Bookman arrived, he spoke to Jesse and noticed that Jesse had bleeding cuts near his right eye and on his chest. Jesse told Bookman that Salas had hit Charles Sr. first and had then hit Jesse in the eye when Jesse tried to intervene. Sandra and Charles Sr. told the other responding officer, Officer Jasmine Badiru, that Salas was upset about his girlfriend, that their attempts to calm him down enraged him, that Charles Sr. told Salas to leave, and that Salas hit Jesse when he tried to step between Charles Sr. and Salas. Charles Sr. and Sandra said that Salas had hit Charles Sr. as well. Badiru noticed that Charles Sr. had injuries to his right eye and left arm and that Jesse had injuries to his right eye and chest. However, Charles Sr., Sandra, and Jesse refused to give written statements and stated they did not want to "press charges." Nevertheless, Bookman arrested Salas based on their verbal reports of Salas's actions and Charles Sr.'s and Jesse's injuries consistent with those statements.

While Bookman drove Salas to jail, Bookman's body camera recorded what Salas was saying. He was "upset and irate," cursing in a steady stream of invectives, which included ethnic slurs and gendered insults. Salas's comments were not the product of any questioning by Bookman. Salas threatened to "kill your b---- a-- when I get out" and that "you're gonna burn, [ethnic slur]." Salas also said, "[H]e's lucky I didn't knock him out like I did the last two or three times." Bookman presumed that Salas's rant was directed at Charles Sr.

Salas was indicted with two counts of assault causing bodily injury to a household or family member—Charles Sr. and Jesse—both third-degree felonies based on the jurisdictional indictment allegation that Salas had been previously convicted of an assaultive offense against a household or family member in 2004. See Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 22.01(a)(1), (b)(2)(A); Price v. State, 457 S.W.3d 437, 442 (Tex. Crim. App. 2015); Reyes v. State, 314 S.W.3d 74, 81 (Tex. App.—San Antonio 2010, no pet.). The indictments additionally included two nonjurisdictional punishment-enhancement paragraphs, alleging that Salas had been convicted of felony assault involving family violence in 2010 and 2016. See Reyes, 314 S.W.3d at 80 (citing Brooks v. State, 957 S.W.2d 30, 33-34 (Tex. Crim. App. 1997)). These two prior felony allegations enhanced Salas's possible punishment range from that of a third-degree felony to a term of "life, or for any term of not more than 99 years or less than 25 years." Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 12.42(d).

At trial, Charles Sr. and Jesse stated that they did not remember the details of the incident and did not want to testify against Salas. Sandra also was reluctant to testify at trial. Charles Sr. testified that he did not know if he was truthful when he had talked to Badiru at the scene about what had happened; but Jesse testified that he would not have lied to the police that night. Charles Sr. believed the incident was "a little bit of [his] fault for following [Salas] outside."

Salas testified that after he tried to leave the house, Charles Sr. grabbed Salas's left arm, blocking Salas's exit. Salas "softly just set [Charles Sr.] to the side" when Jesse suddenly appeared behind Salas. Salas "lift[ed] his hand" to defend himself from Jesse while also "dealing with" Charles Sr. who was "in front of [Salas] at the same time." Salas testified that Charles Sr. frequently frustrated him and knew "how to push [his] buttons" but that Charles Sr. was his best friend.

The jury found Salas not guilty of the assault against Charles Sr. but guilty of the assault against Jesse. At the punishment hearing, Salas pleaded true to the two punishment-enhancement paragraphs. The jury heard evidence regarding Salas's criminal history: (1) a 2007 misdemeanor conviction for harassment, (2) two 2005 misdemeanor convictions for violating a protective order, (3) a 2005 felony conviction for possession of a controlled substance, and (4) a 1998 state-jail felony conviction for possession of a controlled substance. Additionally, the jury heard that Salas had fiveprior convictions for assault involving family violence, four of which were felonies.¹ At the time of trial, Salas also stood accused of assault involving his girlfriend after he had allegedly chased her, grabbed her by the hair to pull her to the ground, and hit her repeatedly in the face with a closed fist. After the punishment trial, the jury assessed Salas's punishment at sixty years' confinement.

On appeal, Salas challenges the sufficiency of the evidence to convict him in light of his justification defense, the admission of the audio from Bookman's body camera, and the length of his sentence.

II. SUFFICIENCY OF THE EVIDENCE

Salas argues that no evidence supported the jury's implied rejection of his justification defense of self-defense. He argues that because the jury should have viewed his actions "solely from [his] perspective," the evidence did not support a finding contrary to Salas's testimony about the assault, rendering the jury's verdict "irrational."

When a defendant raises a justification defense such as self-defense, the jury's guilty verdict is an implicit factual finding that it rejected the defense. See Saxton v. State, 804 S.W.2d 910, 913-14 (Tex. Crim. App. 1991); see also Tex. Penal Code Ann. §§ 9.02, 9.31(a). When a defendant raises self-defense, he bears the burden toproduce some evidence supporting the defense, and the State bears the burden of persuasion to disprove the defense by proving its affirmative case beyond a reasonable doubt. See Braughton v. State, 569 S.W.3d 592, 608 (Tex. Crim. App. 2018); see also Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 2.03(c). To resolve whether the evidence is sufficient to support the jury's implicit rejection of a justification defense, we do not look to whether the State produced evidence refuting the defendant's self-defense testimony; rather, we view the evidence in the light most favorable to the jury's verdict to determine whether any rational trier of fact would have found the essential elements of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt and also would have found against the defendant on his defensive issue beyond a reasonable doubt.² See Braughton, 569 S.W.3d at 608-09; see also Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 2.03(b). In short, we do not view the justification evidence solely from the defendant's perspective in our sufficiency review, as Salas asserts; we review all of the evidence in light of and in favor of the jury's rejection of the defense.³ See Saxton, 804 S.W.2d at 914; Smith v. State, 355 S.W.3d 138, 146 (Tex. App.—Houston [1st Dist.] 2011, pet. ref'd).

"[A] person is justified in using force against another when and to the degree the actor reasonably believes the force is immediately necessary to protect the actor against the other's use or attempted use of unlawful force." Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 9.31(a). Thus, self-defense is justified when "the amount of force actually used was permitted by the circumstances." Alonzo v. State, 353 S.W.3d 778, 783 (Tex. Crim. App. 2011); see Kelley v. State, 968 S.W.2d 395, 399 (Tex. App.—Tyler 1998, no pet.) ("The amount of force used must be in proportion to the force encountered."). Here, the jury saw pictures of Jesse's injuries, which were consistent with Jesse's statement to Bookman that Salas had hit Charles Sr., Jesse had then stepped between Charles Sr. and Salas, and Salas had hit Jesse in the face twice. Charles Sr. and Sandra similarly told Badiru that...