Peyronel v. Texas (original by judge hervey)
Annotate this CaseAppellant was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child under fourteen years of age. The jury fined him $10,000 and sentenced him to fifty years in the Correctional Institutions Division of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. During a break in the punishment-phase proceeding, an unidentified woman that was “part of the defense” approached a juror and asked, “How does it feel to convict an innocent man?” At a conference that followed the comment and outside the presence of the jury, the judge determined that the best way to assuage jury intimidation fears was to exclude all members from the gallery for the remainder of the punishment phase. On appeal, Appellant argued that he preserved a complaint for review that his right to a public trial was violated and that the closure of the courtroom violated that right Appellant argued further that the proposed remedy was too broad and would “create the impression in the jury’s mind that [Appellant] has absolutely no support whatsoever here.” The State argued that a defendant’s public-trial right is subject to forfeiture, and that Appellant’s complaint was not properly preserved. The court of appeals agreed with Appellant that he preserved his claim, reversed the trial-court judgment as to punishment, and remanded the case to the trial court for a new punishment hearing. The Court of Criminal Appeals reversed. The Court agreed with Appellant that he was not required to use “magic language” to preserve his public-trial complaint for review, but Appellant had the burden to “state[] the grounds for the ruling . . . 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.” But it appeared to the Court that Appellant "was worried about the perception of the jury if no one was present in the gallery to support him, but it is hardly clear from the record that Appellant’s argument was the functional equivalent of asserting that his constitutional right to a public trial was being violated."
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