Gardner v. State

The court rejects appellant's claims that his guilty plea is invalid under Boykin because the record does not affirmatively show that appellant understood the nature of the constitutional due process protections that he was waiving when he pled guilty.

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Click here for the full text of this decision FACTS:The appellant was charged in a five- count indictment with aggravated sexual assault of a 6-year-old girl. The appellant provided the police with a written confession which the appellant unsuccessfully sought to have suppressed. The appellant also filed an election to have a jury assess punishment and an application for community supervision (probation) “in the event a punishment phase of the trial is necessary.” The appellant pleaded guilty before the jury after the prosecution read counts I through IV of the indictment. Without any objection from the appellant, the trial court accepted appellant’s guilty plea after ascertaining that appellant was pleading guilty for no other reason than that he was guilty and not because of any promise made on behalf of the state. HOLDING:Affirmed. The court of appeals decided that the trial court’s error in failing to provide the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 26.13 admonishments applicable to appellant did not affect appellant’s substantial rights under the harm analysis for non-constitutional error set out in Texas Rule of Appellate Procedure 44.2(b) because, among other things, the appellant did not show that he would not have pleaded guilty had the trial court properly admonished him. The two grounds upon which this court granted review state: “1. The Court of Appeals erred in holding the trial court’s error in failing to adequately admonish the Defendant was statutory error under [Aguirre-Mata, 125 S.W.3d 473 (Tex.Cr.App. 2003)] instead of constitutional error under [Boykin v. Alabama, 395 U.S. 238 (1969)]. 2. The Court of Appeals erred in failing to address whether the admonishments and inquiries of the Defendant by the trial court was sufficient to satisfy [Boykin v. Alabama] that the plea was intelligently and voluntarily made.” The court agrees with the claim presented in ground two that the state-law issue addressed by the court of appeals was not the constitutional issue that appellant raised under Boykin. Whether a trial court has complied with Article 26.13 and whether it has complied with Boykin are two separate issues, the court states. With respect to ground one, the appellant makes essentially the same claim here that he made in the court of appeals. The court notes that appellant does not claim, and the record does not support a finding, that appellant’s guilty plea “cannot stand as an intelligent admission of guilt;” nor can it be said that appellant was terrorized into pleading guilty. The appellant claims that his guilty plea is invalid under Boykin because the record does not affirmatively show that appellant understood the nature of the constitutional due process protections that he was waiving when he pled guilty. In Aguirre-Mata, this court noted that Boykin did not specifically set out what must be “spread on the record” to comply with Boykin’s mandate. In addition to mentioning things like the invalidity of guilty pleas induced by “terror,” Boykin mentioned three constitutional rights that a guilty plea waives: the privilege against compelled self-incrimination, the right to a jury trial and the right to confront one’s accusers. The record in this case adequately shows that appellant understood that he was waiving these rights when he pled guilty, the court finds. This is inferred, in part, from appellant’s counsel’s statements during the punishment phase mentioning that appellant would testify even though he did not have to under the Fifth Amendment and that appellant’s guilty plea saved the victim from having to testify and saved the jury from the “grueling experience” of determining appellant’s guilt The voluntary nature of appellant’s guilty plea is further shown in the record by the overwhelming evidence that appellant’s guilty plea was part of a strategy (which the court infers was done in consultation with competent counsel) to persuade the jury to grant appellant probation. Unlike this case, the record in Boykin was silent on whether the defendant’s guilty plea was part of some trial strategy. Further, the court notes that in Brady, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the validity of a guilty plea accompanied by admonishments similar to those here. OPINION:Hervey, J., delivered the opinion of the court in which Keller, PJ., Meyers, Womack, Keasler, Holcomb and Cochran, JJ., joined. Price and Johnson, JJ., concurred.

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