Robert Gene Garza, Appellant v. the State of Texas

Summary

The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the capital murder conviction and death sentence, rejecting challenges to the factual sufficiency of the evidence, the voluntariness of the appellant's statement, the compelled display of his gang tattoos, and his trial counsel's performance. Acting on unassigned fundamental error, the court held that capital punishment is unavailable for organized criminal activity under Penal Code § 71.02 when the underlying offense is capital murder, construing § 71.02(b) to cap the offense at first-degree-felony punishment because applying the one-category-higher rule to a capital felony would produce an absurd result. It further held that convicting and punishing the appellant in a single proceeding for both capital murder and capital-murder-based organized criminal activity violates neither the same-elements analysis nor the Double Jeopardy Clause, because Penal Code § 71.03(3) clearly expresses legislative intent to allow both punishments. The court accordingly affirmed the organized-criminal-activity conviction but vacated its death sentence and remanded for resentencing as a first-degree felony; Womack, J., dissented (that separate writing is not in the provided record).