MEYERS, J., delivered the opinion of the Court in which KELLER, P.J., and KEASLER, HERVEY, and COCHRAN, JJ., joined.
Appellant was convicted of murder and sentenced to sixty years in prison. Finding that Appellant suffered "some harm" by the erroneous submission of the "by manner and means unknown" jury charge, the Sixth Court of Appeals reversed the judgment of the trial court and remanded for further proceedings.
We now reverse the judgment of the court of appeals in light of our recent opinion on motion for rehearing in Sanchez v. State.
Appellant called 911 and explained that he had found his wife Rebecca floating, face down and unresponsive, in the middle of their pond. Emergency personnel responded to the call and attempted to revive Rebecca, but she was pronounced dead at the hospital. Hospital records listed the mechanism of injury as "drowning."
At trial, evidence was introduced that indicated a possible history of domestic violence in the marriage, that Appellant's defense that he had left the house and been gone for around forty minutes during the time of Rebecca's death was questionable, and that Rebecca hated the pond, and would not have gone into the heavily wooded
Appellant was indicted for murder. In a three-paragraph indictment, the State alleged Appellant did then and there:
The medical examiner explained that in eighty-five percent of manual strangulation cases, petechiae — small red or purple spots caused by a hemorrhage — are present in the eye. The medical examiner did not find petechiae in Rebecca's eye, but there was some sign of injury close to the collarbone — a "3/16-inch angulated red mark," a puncture of the skin in that area and a 1-inch area of "soft tissue hemorrhage" just below the puncture. She had another hemorrhage on the right side of her neck, but there were no bruises or abrasions on her neck area, and there was no way to determine whether the red mark occurred before or after her death. Appellant testified that the paramedics dropped Rebecca multiple times when they were loading her onto the gurney and that they placed a C collar on her neck which caused the red mark. However, the paramedics testified that Rebecca was never dropped from the gurney and that they did not place a C collar on her neck. Additionally, there were no signs of a struggle, which would normally be found when examining a healthy adult who has been strangled. Some sort of asphyxia was suspected because her lungs had "froth in large airways" containing "edema, intra-alveolar hemorrhage and aspirated food." However, asphyxia was not listed as the cause of death because the noted symptoms of asphyxia could have been the result of the resuscitation efforts.
The autopsy report concluded that Rebecca had died as a result of "undetermined causes." The comment section of the report stated: "Based on investigation and injuries found at autopsy, this case is suspicious for homicide." However, at trial it was discovered that this statement was based on a report that contained inaccurate statements. Over a year after the original autopsy report was completed, it was amended to list "homicidal violence" as the cause of death based on newly submitted affidavits from multiple people that detailed the rocky relationship between Appellant and Rebecca and her dislike of the woods.
The medical examiner testified at trial that the cause of death was "some sort of asphyxia. Could be drowning, could be strangulation, could be suffocation. We can't specifically pick which one, because when you deal with an asphyxial type of death, the findings are very subtle."
The jury was charged in the disjunctive, with the same three alternative methods of murder that were alleged in the indictment. The jury was also instructed that it did not have to agree on whether the death was caused by strangulation, drowning, or asphyxiation by manner and means unknown, but was required to unanimously
Defense counsel objected, saying, "on cause of death, which must be proved in every murder case, the evidence concerning cause of death must come from a qualified medical expert. One expert testified that it was undetermined. Another expert testified to homicidal violence per the autopsy. Therefore, there is no credible cause of death evidence concerning strangulation, drowning, or asphyxiation by an unknown means." The court overruled the objection.
The jury found Appellant guilty and sentenced him to sixty years in prison.
On appeal to the Sixth Court of Appeals, Appellant again complained about the submission of the "by manner and means unknown" jury charge. The court of appeals agreed that the charge was erroneous based on "a history of caselaw" involving such allegations.
In its first ground for review, the State argues that Appellant's objection at trial was inadequate to preserve error. The State posits that Appellant's objection that there was no evidence supporting any manner and means was essentially a motion for a directed verdict. In Sanchez, the appellant specifically complained about the portion of the charge regarding the manner and means being unknown to the grand jury. Here, Appellant objected to the entire charge and was not specific.
The State further argues that Appellant's objection was not only inadequate to warrant a some-harm review, but also that, based on Sanchez, it was so insufficient that it did not preserve charge error at all. The State explains that Appellant's objection to the jury charge was too late to preserve his complaint because Sanchez requires that a defendant object to the lack of notice before trial or during trial.
In its third ground for review, the State points out that, unlike Sanchez, the record in this case demonstrates that all of the evidence that could have been presented at trial was neither ascertained nor presented. For example, in Sanchez, the victim and the suspect were found in a sealed hotel room by the police, but here (according to Appellant), the victim was found floating in a pond. It was not known if the victim suffered the fatal trauma in the pond or somewhere else, and it was not clear that she had drowned because she was found floating and not submerged. The State argues that this list of possible manner and means is so broad as to be tantamount to an unknown manner and means allegation. Finally, in its fourth ground for review, the State asserts that based on the state of the evidence, the court of appeals should have concluded that the "unknown manner and means" instruction was warranted, not that it was harmful error.
Appellant argues that his pretrial objections to the indictment and later objections to the jury charge were sufficient to preserve error and cites our decision in Tucker v. State, in which we explained the general prerequisite to preserve a complaint for appellate review. Appellant asserts that it is clear that he met this prerequisite and objected with enough specificity to later argue that the jury was erroneously charged based on the Sanchez rationale. Appellant emphasizes that Texas courts have recognized the "difficulty of formulating the proper objection when faced with an unusual type of evidence"
Additionally, Appellant explains that as evidence was introduced at trial, it became apparent that the submission of all three allegations was inappropriate and claims to have made a clear, pretrial objection to the manner and means unknown allegation. Appellant contends that the State's speculation as to Appellant's trial strategy does not render Sanchez inapplicable. Appellant explains that Sanchez provides no indication as to what objections were made
In response to the third and fourth grounds for review, Appellant asserts that the reasoning of Sanchez does apply outside the narrow confines of the case and that the court of appeals correctly determined that he suffered some harm from the erroneous jury charge. Appellant argues that in Sanchez, the evidence in support of the conviction was overwhelming, but the testimony as to manner and means was not. Appellant further explains that the court of appeals engaged in the same inquiry as our Court in Sanchez and concludes that once the erroneous charge was removed, the evidence was insufficient to convict on other theories.
Because we had not yet handed down our opinion on motion for rehearing in Sanchez, the court of appeals and the parties in this case relied on our original Sanchez opinion. Therefore, we will begin with a summary of our Sanchez opinion on motion for rehearing.
In Sanchez, two guests in a motel room called the police after hearing a woman screaming in an adjoining room. Upon arrival, the police heard a stun gun go off inside the room in which the woman had screamed. When the police entered the room, they found the appellant lying next to his dead, naked girlfriend. His girlfriend's face and neck were bruised and there were marks from a stun gun on both her neck and chest. There was only one door to the room, and it had been barricaded. Also all of the windows had been painted shut. At trial, the medical expert listed "asphyxia by strangulation" as the cause of death, but indicated that he was unsure as to whether the cause of asphyxia was strangulation or the stun gun. Similar to this case, the appellant was charged with murder and both the indictment and the jury charge included two known manner and means theories and two unknown manner and means theories. The jury charge allowed the jurors to consider each manner and means in the disjunctive, and appellant was convicted under a "manner and means unknown" theory. The Thirteenth Court of Appeals applied Hicks v. State,
In our recent opinion on motion for rehearing, we explained that the Hicks rule relied upon by the court of appeals is no longer viable since the adoption of the "hypothetically correct" jury charge in Malik v. State,
Because the first and second grounds for review focus on preservation issues, we shall begin with a discussion of Appellant's third ground for review to determine whether there was jury-charge error that needed to be preserved.
In the third ground for review, this Court is asked to determine whether the reasoning of Sanchez applies outside the narrow confines of that case. While Appellant's and State's briefs on this issue, as well as the court of appeals's decision were written before our decision on motion for rehearing in Sanchez we are still able to conclude that the reasoning from Sanchez may apply under different circumstances. However, in this instance, the court of appeals incorrectly held that the manner and means could be determined from a known choice of several options. It is clear that this case is distinguishable from Sanchez, in which there was a closed universe of possibilities regarding manner and means. In Sanchez, we stated that the court's instructions should be reduced to the theories that are supported by the evidence at trial.
Because we hold that the trial court did not commit jury-charge error, there is no need to address the first and second grounds for review regarding preservation or the fourth ground for review concerning
KELLER, P.J., and COCHRAN, J., filed concurring opinions. WOMACK, J., concurred.
ALCALA, J., filed a dissenting opinion in which PRICE and JOHNSON, JJ., joined.
KELLER, P.J., filed a concurring opinion.
I agree that the trial judge was not required to instruct the jury on the specific manner and means of committing murder in this case. But I also believe that a trial judge is not required to instruct on the specific manner and means of committing murder in any case. In our recent opinion in Johnson v. State,
If a variance can never be material, it can never render the evidence legally insufficient to support the conviction.
With these comments, I join the Court's opinion.
COCHRAN, J., filed a concurring opinion.
I agree that the trial judge did not err when he instructed the jury on the "unknown" manner and means of committing murder. I write separately because I believe that this area of law has become overly formalististic and divorced from its original purpose of giving notice to the defendant.
The common-law rule
Few Texas cases explain the purpose or genesis of this policy, but one of the cases that the Walker court relied on was People v. Cronin,
The original rule was simple in theory and in practice: If, after making a diligent inquiry, the grand jury cannot determine precisely what was the manner (the actus reus — shooting, poisoning, hitting, stabbing, strangling) of the offense or the means (the instrument — gun, sword, knife, hands, manhole cover) that the offender used to commit the offense, just say so in the indictment. Do the best you can; that is good enough. In the past, we should not have made a mighty mountain out of a pleading molehill. We do not do so in these times.
If the defendant is flummoxed by the failure to have greater notice, he may file a motion to quash the indictment and put the State to its burden to show that it still does not know the precise manner and means. If the State does have more information about the manner and means (or at least has a more precise range of possibilities), then it must give the defense notice of that evidentiary information. If, at the motion to quash hearing, it turns out that the State now knows exactly what manner and means it intends to prove, the trial judge may order the State to amend the
Regardless of whether the defendant files a pretrial motion to quash the indictment, if the evidence at trial clearly establishes a specific manner and means, or a combination of various alternatives, then the judge should omit the "unknown" language in his jury charge. Instead, as the majority states, the jury charge should be written to give the jury a choice from the limited list of possibilities regarding manner and means.
I join the majority opinion.
ALCALA, J., filed a dissenting opinion in which PRICE and JOHNSON, J.J., joined.
The court of appeals reversed the conviction of David Len Moulton, appellant, who was convicted of killing his wife, Rebecca Moulton, who was found dead in a pond on their property. Moulton v. State, 360 S.W.3d 540, 543 (Tex.App.Texarkana 2011). The majority opinion reverses the court of appeals by finding no error in the jury charge. I respectfully dissent for two reasons. First, because the court of appeals has not had the opportunity to consider this case in light of this Court's opinion on rehearing in Sanchez v. State, we should remand this case to afford the court that opportunity. See Sanchez v. State, 376 S.W.3d 767 (Tex.Crim.App. 2012). Second, I disagree with the majority opinion's holding on the merits that the trial court properly instructed the jury to convict if the evidence proved "asphyxiation by means unknown to the grand jury." I find that this instruction is erroneous in its reference to the grand jury, but conclude that the error is harmless.
The court of appeals analyzed this case under this Court's original opinion in Sanchez, but, since then, we have withdrawn that opinion and issued a materially different opinion on rehearing. Compare Sanchez v. State, No. PD-0961-07, 2010 WL 3894640, 2010 Tex.Crim.App. LEXIS 1242 (Tex.Crim.App. Oct. 6, 2010) (orig.op.), with 376 S.W.3d 767 (Tex.Crim.App.2012) (op. on reh'g). The original opinion focused on whether the manner and means were unknown or unknowable, but the opinion on rehearing abandoned that distinction and focused on the hypothetically correct jury charge based on the evidence actually introduced at trial. See Sanchez, 376 S.W.3d at 772-73; see also Malik v. State, 953 S.W.2d 234, 240 (Tex.Crim.App. 1997). In the Sanchez opinion on rehearing, we expressly overruled the Hicks rule, which had required evidence regarding what the grand jury knew at the time it issued the indictment when the indictment
The materiality of the original Sanchez opinion to the court of appeals's analysis in this case is evident in that three of the four grounds that we granted in appellant's petition for discretionary review refer to it expressly by name.
Because the majority opinion addresses the merits of the case, I must also address the merits to explain why I conclude that it errs in holding this jury instruction proper. I would find the jury instructions erroneous but harmless.
The majority opinion concludes that the manner and means are unknown because the crime scene does not point to a conclusive list of possibilities.
At trial, two medical experts testified, one for the State and one for the defense. The State's expert, Dr. McClain, performed the autopsy and prepared an original and amended report. In her original report, which she prepared the day after the complainant died, she characterized the cause and manner of death as "undetermined,"
At trial, she explained that "the mechanism of death" was "asphyxia." With respect to the type of asphyxia, Dr. McClain stated,
Dr. McClain limited the universe of the forms of asphyxia that could have occurred in this case to only four possibilities when she testified,
Because she testified to four possible forms of asphyxia that could have occurred in this case, Dr. McClain's testimony could not have supported the jury instruction as to "asphyxiation by an unknown means." Inclusion of a manner and means unsupported by the evidence was precisely why we found the jury charge erroneous in our opinion on rehearing in Sanchez. See Sanchez, 376 S.W.3d at 774.
But, unlike Sanchez, in which only one medical examiner testified about his consistent findings regarding the cause of death, two examiners testified in this case, Dr. McClain and the defense's witness, Dr. Bux, and each of them, at some point in time, determined that the manner and means of death were unknown. Dr. Bux testified that he agreed with the original autopsy report's conclusion that the manner of death was undetermined, explaining that he could not even determine whether it was a homicide.
The jury instruction, however, permitted the jury to convict appellant if it determined that the complainant died "by asphyxiation by means unknown to the
As we observed in Sanchez, what was known to the grand jury is not the appropriate question in deciding what the jury instructions should be. See id. at 772. Rather, the appropriate question is whether some evidence in the record supports the jury instruction. See id. at 773. Here, there is some evidence — Dr. Bux's testimony and the findings in the original autopsy report — that the asphyxiation was caused by manner and means unknown; therefore, the trial court properly included that instruction, but it erred by referring to the grand jury. See id.
In our Sanchez opinion on rehearing, we determined that the error was harmless in light of the totality of the evidence. Id. at 774-75. The error in Sanchez was considerably more material to the outcome than the error in this case because two of the four paragraphs permitted convictions based on an alternative manner and means not supported by the evidence. Those allegations referred to "manner and means to the Grand Jurors unknown," and the evidence undisputedly limited the manner and means to a list of known possibilities. Id. at 774. Here, by contrast, because Dr. Bux testified, and the original autopsy report showed, that the cause of asphyxia was unknown, the only error in the jury instruction was the minimal reference to the grand jury.
As we expressly stated in Sanchez on rehearing, "Neither the manner (the actus reus) nor the means (the "instrument of death") need to be agreed upon unanimously by a jury." Id. at 773. We clearly stated that the "jury need only unanimously agree that [a defendant] caused the death of the complainant." Id. at 774. Because each of the paragraphs permitting the jury to convict appellant required it to find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he caused the death of the complainant by asphyxiation, the jury unanimously determined how the complainant died, homicide, and the cause of her death, asphyxia. In light of this unanimous verdict, I cannot conceive of how the four words in the charge referencing the grand jury could have harmed appellant when his own expert testified that the manner and means of death were unknown.
I would reverse and remand to allow the court of appeals to consider our opinion on rehearing in Sanchez. See id. at 767. Alternatively, I would reverse the judgment of the court of appeals and render a judgment affirming appellant's conviction.
Id. at 197-98.
Id. The California Court also referred to the "famous" 1850 Webster case from Massachusetts, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Court explained the common-law "unknown manner and means" indictment rule:
Commonwealth v. Webster, 59 Mass. (5 Cush.) 295, 322-23 (Mass. 1850).
The fourth issue challenges the court of appeals's harm analysis.