disagreeing with the hypothesis that the lack of ability to prove harm equals the lack of harm itself, but acknowledging that this reasoning appears to drive each of the Court of Criminal Appeals's Cain[1] analyses
How later courts described this case
- disagreeing with the hypothesis that the lack of ability to prove harm equals the lack of harm itself, but acknowledging that this reasoning appears to drive each of the Court of Criminal Appeals's Cain[1] analyses
- distinguishing deprivation of right to counsel from deprivation of component right to conduct voir dire
- stating that trial court’s impermissible exclusion of proper question during voir dire is subject to harmless-error analysis
- finding that the Texarkana Court of Appeals erred in concluding that the error is incapable of analysis for harm
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
PRICE, J.,
delivered a dissenting opinion in which JOHNSON, J. joined.
I respectfully dissent. It is fruitless to remand this cause to the court of appeals for a harmless error analysis because no meaningful finding of harm can be explained, quantified, or proved regarding a wrongfully prohibited voir dire question.
The majority contends that “[w]e recognize that certain types of error may defy proper analysis or the data may be insufficient to conduct a meaningful harm analysis” and “some errors may never be harmless or will rarely be harmless.” This logic seems similar to the reasoning in Nunfio: when a trial court improperly circumscribed a defendant’s voir dire, harm is presumed because the defendant is denied the chance to properly and intelligently use his peremptory strikes. See Nunfio, 808 S.W.2d at 485. But the majority opinion overrules Nunfio, and the opposite result will now undoubtedly occur. Ante, at 171. I disagree with the hypothesis that the lack of ability to prove harm equals the lack of harm itself, but this seems to be the driving force in each of this Court’s Cain analyses.
For the foregoing reasons, I respectfully dissent.