Gonzalez v. Texas (original by judge slaughter)
Annotate this CaseSeveral officers were dispatched to locate a vehicle carrying stolen merchandise. The merchandise had been equipped with a tracking device and placed in a “bait” car before being stolen. Using the tracking device, the officers traced the merchandise to a Hummer driven by Appellant Victor Gonzalez. After observing the Hummer commit a traffic violation, the officers initiated a traffic stop. Appellant attempted to flee but ran into a dead end in an apartment complex’s parking lot. Two police cars pulled up closely on either side of the Hummer to prevent Appellant from getting out. As Officer Taylor Rogers got out of his patrol car to arrest Appellant, Appellant reversed and accelerated. The Hummer collided with the side of a patrol car and injured Officer Rogers. After successfully reversing away from the officers, Appellant sped off, crashed the Hummer into a nearby structure, and then fled on foot. Appellant was eventually arrested and charged with aggravated assault of a public servant with a deadly weapon. The issue this appeal presented for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was whether a defendant was harmed by an erroneous jury charge if the error at issue effectively amounted to nothing more than a formatting defect. Relevant here, the unobjected-to jury instructions tracked the statutory language and allowed for conviction for an intentional, knowing, or reckless aggravated assault on a public servant. The indictment, however, alleged only an intentional or knowing aggravated assault on a public servant. The Court concluded that erroneously including recklessness in the jury charge application paragraph was, under the facts of this case, a mere formatting defect that did not cause egregious harm. The Court reversed the judgment of the court of appeals which held to the contrary, and remanded this case to that court for further proceedings.
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