In re Hector Medina (original by judge newell)
Annotate this CaseRelator was convicted of capital murder for killing his two children, Javier and Diana Medina. The Office of Capital Writs filed an initial writ of habeas corpus application with the convicting court on relator’s behalf. Counsel raised several Cronic- and Strickland-based claims of ineffective assistance of trial counsel, predicated on trial counsel’s abandonment of the adversarial testing of the State’s punishment case. The habeas judge issued an order designating those claims for further development and held a hearing. Following the hearing, the State noticed its intent to call relator as a witness at the evidentiary hearing. The issue this case presented for the Court of Criminal Appeals’ review was whether the State, in a post-conviction evidentiary hearing on a writ of habeas corpus, was clearly prohibited from calling the writ applicant to testify (under a grant of both use and derivative-use immunity) about whether he was aware of and agreed to trial counsel’s strategy at the punishment stage of his capital-murder trial. Because this case was presented to the Court of Criminal Appeals as a writ of prohibition, the Court was not asked to decide the precise scope of the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination. Instead, the issue was whether the trial court made a judicial decision or a ministerial one. Specifically, the Court had to decide whether the law on this issue was so clear that the trial court had no choice but to prohibit the State from calling relator to the stand. After examining the relevant case law regarding the scope of the Fifth Amendment from the United States Supreme Court and Texas precedent, the Court of Criminal Appeals could not say that the trial court had a ministerial duty to prohibit the State from calling relator to testify. Therefore, the Court denied the writ of prohibition.
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