Guthrie-Nail v. Texas (original by presiding judge keller)
Annotate this CaseAppellant was indicted for capital murder and conspiracy to commit capital murder. After a few days of trial testimony, the parties reached an agreement: The State waived the capital-murder charge in exchange for appellant pleading guilty to the conspiracy charge for a fifty-year prison sentence. More than two months after the original judgment was entered, the trial judge signed a judgment nunc pro tunc, changing the “Findings on Deadly Weapon” entry from “N/A” to “Yes, a Firearm.” The judgment nunc pro tunc also added a special finding that appellant “used or exhibited a deadly weapon or was a party to the offense and knew that a deadly weapon would be used or exhibited.” The effect of this finding was that appellant would not be eligible for parole until she served at least twenty-five years of her sentence. Appellant argued on appeal that the trial judge erred in entering the judgment nunc pro tunc because: (1) the judgment corrected a judicial error rather than a clerical one; (2) there was no record support to conclude that appellant personally used or exhibited a deadly weapon; and (3) appellant’s right to due process was violated because, “almost three months later,” the trial judge “add[ed] a deadly-weapon finding without notice to appellant.” In the body of the brief on the third claim, appellant argued both that the “State failed to give appellant notice in the indictment that it intended to seek a deadly-weapon finding” and that “appellant was not given notice that the trial court changed the original judgment to add an affirmative deadly-weapon finding.” The court of appeals concluded that the judgment nunc pro tunc was correctly entered. Upon review, the Court of Criminal Appeals concluded that it was "beyond dispute that [appellant] had such a right and that this right was violated." Remand was necessary because the State’s entitlement to a nunc pro tunc judgment depended on at least one issue of fact (whether, at the time of trial, the trial judge actually made a deadly-weapon finding), and this issue of fact had not been conclusively resolved in the State’s favor.
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