Unreported / Non-Citable
Background
On April 4, 2022, Jasmine Torres and Susan Flores collided their vehicles in an apartment complex parking lot in Bexar County. After a brief argument, Flores left to pick up her children from school and called 911 to report the collision. When Flores returned to the complex, she encountered Torres’s husband and mother, who began arguing with her. Torres then came outside and joined the dispute. During the altercation, Torres struck Flores in the forehead, causing a visible knot documented by photographs.
Torres was charged with misdemeanor assault-bodily injury. At trial, she did not dispute striking Flores but asserted defenses of self-defense, defense of others, or mutual combat. The jury found her guilty, and the trial court sentenced her to 60 days in jail with the sentence suspended, placing her on 30 days of community supervision. Torres appealed on two evidentiary grounds.
The Court’s Holding
The court affirmed the conviction. On Torres’s first issue, the trial court properly excluded testimony from Torres’s mother, Lori Vega, under the witness exclusion rule (Texas Rule of Evidence 614). Although Torres argued the exclusion violated her constitutional right to present a defense, the court applied the two-part Webb test. While the trial court erred in relying on the first prong—Torres did not consent to or procure Vega’s alleged rule violation—the second prong supported exclusion. Torres failed to demonstrate that Vega’s testimony was crucial to her defensive theories. Torres herself testified and appeared in a video explaining her account of events to the investigating officer, which supported her self-defense narrative. Additionally, Torres made no bill of exception preserving what Vega’s specific testimony would have established, leaving the appellate court with insufficient information to conclude the testimony was essential.
On Torres’s second issue, the court held that Torres failed to preserve her argument that the trial court should have admitted the complete body-worn camera video under the rule of optional completeness (Texas Rule of Evidence 107). When the trial court sustained the State’s hearsay objection to the full 1-hour-4-minute video, Torres offered no counter-argument or alternative legal theory. Because she did not “put the trial court on notice” of her completeness argument at the time of exclusion, the issue was waived on appeal and could not be reviewed.
Key Takeaways
- A trial court may exclude a defense witness for violating the witness exclusion rule, even though the right to present witnesses is constitutionally protected, if the excluded testimony is not crucial to the defense.
- Defendants must make explicit arguments at trial about which evidentiary rules or theories justify admitting evidence; silence or generic objections waive appellate review.
- When a defendant testifies and presents video evidence supporting their version of events, testimony from another witness corroborating that account may not be deemed “crucial” to the defense.
- A bill of exception is critical for preserving appellate review when excluded evidence is not shown; without it, appellate courts have insufficient information to assess whether testimony was essential.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces two important procedural rules in criminal appeals. First, it clarifies that while defendants have a constitutional right to call witnesses, that right is not absolute and can be limited when a witness violates the exclusion rule and the excluded testimony is not shown to be crucial. The court emphasized that Torres’s own testimony and the body-worn camera video provided the jury with her complete account and opportunity to evaluate her credibility, diminishing any need for corroborating testimony from Vega. Second, the decision underscores the necessity of preservation: defendants who wish to challenge evidentiary rulings must articulate their legal theories to the trial court contemporaneously, not for the first time on appeal. The failure to invoke the rule of optional completeness at trial, despite offering alternative evidence during cross-examination, resulted in waiver of an entire appellate argument.
For practitioners, the opinion serves as a reminder that strategic choices at trial—whether to make a bill of exception, to argue alternative bases for admission, or to explain why excluded evidence is crucial—directly determine what issues survive appeal. Absent clear preservation, even colorable evidentiary arguments will not reach appellate review.