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682 S.W.2d 261

28 Tex.Sup.Ct.J. 178

Ex Parte Griffin

Texas Supreme Court

Decided December 19, 1984

Texas Supreme Court · decided 1984-12-19

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“[t]he Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees the right to jury trials for serious offenses, but not petty offenses”

quoted by 1 later decision, including In re Hesse

Relies on Levine v. United States · Ex Parte Johnson

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1984-12-19

How this case has been cited

Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently June 2018

16 state decisions

901984199020002010decided

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 →

ROBERTSON, Justice,

¶1concurring.

¶2I reluctantly concur in the result reached by this Court. However, I am of the opinion that this case presents another example of trial by ambush. Griffin was represented by counsel of his own choosing. He remained silent throughout the contempt proceedings and never requested a jury, nor has he asserted any disputed issues of fact to be decided by a jury. Now in this *263Court, he complains for the first time that he was denied a fundamental right because there is no record that he formally waived a jury trial.

¶3Contempt is a unique, quasi-criminal sanction. Procedural safeguards for contempt do not derive from the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, but from traditional notions of due process. Levine v. United States, 362 U.S. 610, 616, 80 S.Ct. 1038, 1042, 4 L.Ed.2d 989 (1960). Therefore, the full panoply of Sixth Amendment rights available to persons in ordinary criminal proceedings should not apply in contempt proceedings. I refer to my previous dissent in Ex parte Johnson, 654 S.W.2d 415, 422-423 (Tex.1983).

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