Texas v. Esparza (Original)
Annotate this CaseFollowing his arrest for driving while intoxicated, appellee filed a motion to suppress "all evidence seized as a result of illegal acts by the state." Specifically, he alleged that his arrest was illegal and that the circumstances under which breath testing for blood-alcohol concentration was conducted rendered the results as illegally obtained. At a pretrial hearing on the motion to suppress, the State presented testimony from one of the arresting officers and then rested. The trial court determined that the appellee's arrest was legal, but nevertheless granted the appellee's motion to suppress on the basis that "[t]he State failed to present any testimony regarding the breath test results[.]" The State appealed, and the Court of Appeals reversed the trial court's ruling, holding that the arrest was legal and that the appellee had failed to establish any illegalities in the way the breath-test results were obtained. The Supreme Court granted appellee's petition for review of his contention that the court of appeals erred in failing to uphold the trial court's ruling as "correct under any theory of law applicable to the case." The Supreme Court acknowledged that appellants can be deprived of an adequate opportunity "to develop a complete factual record" with respect to an alternative legal theory, and it would be incongruous with case law to treat a purported alternative legal theory as truly law "applicable to the case" under those circumstances. "If the alternative legal theory that an appellee proffers for the first time on appeal as a basis to affirm a trial court's otherwise faulty judgment turns upon the production of predicate facts by the appellant (here, the State) that he was never fairly called upon to adduce during the course of the proceedings below, then application of the 'Calloway' rule to affirm that otherwise faulty judgment works a manifest injustice. An appellee's alternative legal theory should not be considered 'law applicable to the case' under these circumstances, and this is so regardless of whether the appellee was the defendant or the State at the trial court level." Accordingly, the Court held that, because the State was never confronted with the necessity of meeting its burden to establish the scientific reliability of its breath-test results at the hearing on the appellee's pretrial motion to suppress, and for that reason the record was undeveloped with respect to admissibility as a function of scientific reliability, inadmissibility of that evidence under Rule 702 was not a "theory of law applicable to the case" that was available to justify the trial court's otherwise erroneous ruling on the appellee's motion to suppress. The Court affirmed the court of appeals' judgment.
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