Second Court of Appeals
Summaries of Civil Opinions and Published Criminal Opinions Issued - Week of October 19, 2020.
NOTE: Summaries are prepared by the court's staff attorneys and law clerks for public information only and reflect his or her interpretation alone of the facts and legal issues. The summaries are not part of the court's opinion in the case and should not be cited to, quoted, or relied upon as the opinion of the court.
Links to full text of opinions (PDF version) can be accessed by clicking the cause number.
Ex parte K.T., No. 02-19-00376-CV (Oct. 22, 2020) (Gabriel, J., joined by Kerr, J.; Bassel, J., dissents with opinion).
Held: Code of Criminal Procedure Article 55.01(c) does not prohibit expunction of arrest records under Article 55.01(a)(1) for an offense for which a person has been acquitted if that person has only one prior, separate conviction for an offense that is the same or similar to the acquitted offense for which the person is seeking an expunction. The plain language of Article 55.01(c) and Penal Code Section 3.01(2), to which Article 55.01(c) refers, requires the “commission” of at least two same or similar offenses to bar expunction. That a person has been charged with and acquitted of an offense is no evidence that the person has committed an offense. Therefore, on the facts of this case, the trial court did not abuse its discretion by ordering the arrest records for K.T.’s 2017 DWI arrest expunged even though K.T. had been previously convicted of DWI in 2013.
Dissent: Based on the plain language of the expunction statute, the incorporation of the definition of “criminal episode” from Texas Penal Code Section 3.01(2) into the expunction exception contained in Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 55.01(c) means that expunction is not available after acquittal for an offense if the person has ever been convicted of the same or similar offense, even though the offenses are not connected temporally or factually because nothing in the words themselves or how they have been interpreted requires a temporal or factual nexus between the two offenses.