Resendez v. State

Rule 33.1(a) of the Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure provides that a complaint is not preserved for appeal unless it was made to the trial court "by a timely request, objection or motion" that "stated the grounds for the ruling that the complaining party sought from the trial court with sufficient specificity to make the trial court aware of the complaint, unless the specific grounds were apparent from the context." Likewise, under Rule 103 of the Texas Rules of Evidence, error may not be predicated upon a ruling which admits or excludes evidence unless "a timely objection or motion to strike appears of record, stating the specific ground of objection, if the specific ground was not apparent from the context." In the present case, there are no indications on the record to support the contention that the appellant raised a claim based on Article 38.22, �3(a)(2), nor is there anything on the record to support the contention that the trial judge or opposing counsel understood the appellant to have made this claim. Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, No. PD-0917-08, 10-21-2009

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Price, J., delivered the opinion of the Court in which Keller, P.J., and Womack, Keasler, Hervey and Cochran, JJ., joined. Holcomb, J., filed a dissenting opinion in which Meyers and Johnson, JJ., joined.

OPINION

The appellant gave a videotaped statement in which he confessed to shooting Amanda Garza. He later pled guilty to her murder, and the trial court found him guilty and assessed punishment at ninety-nine years in prison. The Fourteenth Court of Appeals reversed and remanded, holding that the trial court erred when it denied the appellant’s motion to suppress the confession because the police had failed to memorialize the appellant’s Miranda warnings on the videotape as required by Code of Criminal Procedure Article 38.22, Section 3(a)(2).*fn1 We granted the State’s petition for discretionary review in order to determine (1) whether the court of appeals was correct in holding that the appellant preserved his Article 38.22 argument for appeal, and (2) whether the appellant was in custody when he gave his videotaped confession.*fn2 Because we hold that the appellant did not preserve his Article 38.22 argument for appeal, we reverse the court of appeals’s judgment.

Resendez v. State

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