Acosta v. Texas (Original)
Annotate this CaseAppellant, convicted of money laundering after officers found half a million dollars in cash hidden inside the speaker box of his tractor-trailer, argued on appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeals that the evidence was legally insufficient to prove that the money represented proceeds from the delivery of a controlled substance. The court of appeals, relying in part on a drug-dog alert to the cash, rejected that argument. The narrow question before the Court of Criminal Appeals was whether the conclusion that the cash money in appellant's truck was the proceeds of drug trafficking was warranted by the cumulative force of all the circumstantial evidence. "In isolation, many of the facts relied on by the State could be characterized as only somewhat probative of whether appellant's cache of cash was drug-delivery proceeds. However, we do not consider evidence myopically or point out problems with the individual, separate facts underlying the State's case because all of the evidence-both direct and circumstantial-must be evaluated as a whole by the reviewing court." After reviewing all of the evidence, the Court agreed that the cumulative force of the circumstantial evidence was sufficient to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the cash was the proceeds of the sale of a controlled substance.
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