Cody Lee Oursbourn, Appellant v. the State of Texas

Summary

The Court of Criminal Appeals held that when evidence raises an issue of the voluntariness of a defendant's statement under Article 38.22, the trial judge must give the general voluntariness instruction required by Sections 6 and 7 because it is the 'law applicable to the case,' even if no party requests it; but because the defendant here neither requested the instruction nor objected to its omission, the failure to include it is reviewed only for egregious harm under the Court's standard for unobjected-to jury-charge error. The Court concluded that evidence of appellant's bipolar disorder, his depressed or manic state, and his incompetency finding two months after the confession raised a general voluntariness issue under Section 6, while his claim did not trigger Article 38.23 because there was no police overreaching and no disputed fact about how the statement was obtained. Finding charge error that the court of appeals majority said did not exist, the Court reversed and remanded to that court to perform the egregious-harm analysis.