Public-domain · open source
OpenJurist

597 S.W.2d 358

Davis v. State

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas

Decided February 20, 1980

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas · decided 1980-02-20

Relies on Jurek v. Texas · Jurek v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1980-02-20

How this case has been cited

Cited by 46 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2017 · most notably Rousseau v. State (1993), Davis v. Johnson (1998)

37 state decisions

2201980199020002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

CLINTON, Judge,

¶1dissenting.

¶2In my opinion the Court is heading for constitutional trouble in its tendency to construe Article 37.071, V.A.C.C.P., as carte blanche for receiving any and every bit of derogatory evidence against an accused. This, I believe, turns the purpose of the provision, as well as the interpretative gloss of intent given by the Supreme Court of the United States in Jurek v. Texas, 428 U.S. 262, 96 S.Ct. 2950, 49 L.Ed.2d 929 (1976), on its head. Indeed, while this Court did say in its Jurekopinion, 522 S.W.2d 934, 940, that the jury could consider that range and severity of his “prior criminal conduct” — a phrase that does not necessarily embrace “details” of his prior offenses — the principle enunciated was that the “quality of discretion” exercised by the jury and “the manner in which it is applied” are what “must be controlled.” In my view, we enhance neither by the opinion of the Court rendered today.

¶3Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.

PHILLIPS, J., joins.
/597/sw2d/358 · .json · Public domain