What is the new merged legal/factual sufficiency standard you ask? Well, it is simply the standard as laid out in Jackson - "a reviewing court is required to defer to a jury’s credibility and weight determinations." No longer is there a factual sufficiency standard wherein the appellate court must view the evidence in a neutral light.What's more:
The dissent further points out that the "barely distinguishable" standard between the Clewis factual-sufficiency standard and the Jackson v. Virginia legal-sufficiency standard is that the former views the evidence in a "neutral" light, while the latter views the evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict.That's a significant difference; it's hardly the case that it's "barely distinguishable." This was a plurality opinion (pdf), with Judge Cathy Cochran providing a concurrence (pdf) in addition to signing onto the majority opinion and Judge Womack - the swing vote - joining Cochran's concurrence. (Strangely, Womack is also listed as concurring with the dissent, but he's not listed among the judges signing onto the actual dissent.) Judge Price's dissent (pdf) argues that Brooks was an activist decision by the court that exceeded its authority:
as our opinion less than four years ago in Watson demonstrated, the authority to reverse a conviction on the basis of factual insufficiency has been recognized from the beginning to be inherent in the appellate jurisdiction of first-tier appellate courts in Texas. We cannot simply decide it need not be “retained” any longer absent a change in the constitutional and statutory provisions that confer that jurisdiction—or else a change in our own long-standing construction of those provisions.These issues had been decided in the past but the conservative wing of the court kept coming back for more bites at the apple. Price laments that: "only thing that arguably makes Clewis seem unworkable is this Court’s lamentable propensity to grant a State’s petition for discretionary review every three or four years to revisit the question whether it is unworkable. The arguments themselves are not new."
MORE: They're jumping for joy over at the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. Williamson County DA John Bradley suggests "Perhaps TDCAA could organize an honorary funeral" for the overturned case.
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7 comments:
Explain to me, Grits, how it is that anyone can figure that elected appellate court judges are better positioned than a jury to assess the credibility of witnesses and the weight of evidence presented at trial. The former reviews the testimony and evidence from a written record while the latter gets to see the trial in person.
Anon 1pm: sometimes the emotion of a crime--gruesome photos, victim impact evidence, etc. can affect the validity of a verdict. Cooler heads prevail don't you think? I for one lament the loss of this type of appellate review
1:00 - See Judge Price's dissent for your explanation.
If you want an activist decision, try Clewis itself. It was predicted and proved to be unworkable.
Anonymous 2:07:00 - the problem with your desire for an impassionate review later is essentially a distrust for the jury system. If you want judges to make these calls, then let's do away with juries altogether.
The reason Clewis made no sense, Grits, was that it allowed for an appellate court to reverse a case for a new trial for factually insufficient evidence. In other words, without holding any of the evidence to be improper, the court of appeals would send the case back for a presumably identical trial before another jury, which could return the same verdict again on the same evidence.
A finding that the evidence was legally insufficient, on the other hand, results in an acquittal, because the state failed to prove their case. Factual insufficiency amounted to the appeallate court saying "OK, you proved your case, but we want to make you do it again, because we don't think you proved it enough."
If you want to have juries involved in making these verdicts, then you need to quit complaining about the inability of juries to make rational decisions about the facts. If you really believe that getting a majority of the voters to elect you judge makes you more rational and better able to make these decisions, then work to do away with jury trials. But don't praise the jury system when you like the result and condemn it when you don't.
11:04, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find me praising the jury system too often. IMO they often convict based on insufficient evidence (e.g., the Tulia convictions) and as with OJ tend to get things wrong about as often as right.
My views on juries are similar to Winston Churchill's statement about democracy - it's the worst system in the world except for all the others.
Fair enough, Grits (10/11 3:51). But all Clewis did was allow the fact determination to be reviewed by three elected judges rather than 12 citizens subjected to the jury selection process. Does getting more votes than the next guy really make you a better judge of the facts than the people who are in court to hear the testimony first hand?
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