State of Texas v. Heilman, Ex Parte Eric Michael ( 2015 )

IN THE COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS
OF TEXAS
NO. PD-1591-13
EX PARTE ERIC MICHAEL HEILMAN, Appellee
ON STATE’S PETITION FOR DISCRETIONARY REVIEW
FROM THE NINTH COURT OF APPEALS
JEFFERSON COUNTY
M EYERS, J., filed a dissenting opinion.
DISSENTING OPINION
Today the majority overrules our prior decision in Phillips v. State, 362 S.W.3d 606
(Tex. Crim. App. 2011), and determines that Appellant is not entitled to relief on his statute
of limitations claim. With today’s decision we are continuing down an unreasonable path of
placing the entire burden on the defendant to complain of statute of limitations issues. The
statute of limitations should not be a defensive issue, and I believe that the case we should
actually be overruling today is Proctor v. State, 967 S.W.2d 840, (Tex. Crim. App. 1998).
In Proctor we changed the law concerning the statute of limitations and held, for the
first time, that limitations is a rule that must be implemented only upon the request of the
Heilman dissent - Page 2
defendant, rather than it being an absolute requirement that must be proved by the State in
every criminal prosecution. Id. at 844. However, making the statute of limitations a defensive
issue was problematic then, and it is problematic now. Defensive issues should be those that
require a defendant to show that he is not guilty of a crime. The statute of limitations has
nothing to do with a defendant’s guilt–it relates only to the State’s timely filing of a case–and
therefore, the defendant should not bear the heavy burden of invoking it. The statute of
limitations is meant to be something the State must prove in order to prosecute, much like
it must prove that a crime took place in a particular county. T EX. C ODE C RIM. P ROC. art.
13.17. Further, the State is allowed to allege in the indictment that the crime took place “on
or about” a certain date, so long as that date is “anterior to the presentment of the indictment,
and not so remote that the prosecution of the offense is barred by limitation.” T EX. C ODE
C RIM. P ROC. art. 21.02. Requiring that the dates the State alleges not be barred by limitation
is at odds with holding that the State must actually prove that the offense occurred within the
statute of limitations only if the defendant raises the issue. See Proctor v. State, 967 S.W.2d
at 847 (Meyers, J., dissenting).
The present problems surrounding the statute of limitations arose when this court
decided to change the law and make limitations a defensive issue. Proctor is a not a well-
reasoned or substantiated opinion, and was decided the way it was only in order to keep the
convictions in the case from being overturned. Today, rather than overruling Phillips, we
should be correcting the mistake made in Proctor and return to considering the statute of
Heilman dissent - Page 3
limitations an absolute requirement that is the State’s burden to prove. Therefore, I would
overrule Proctor and remand this case to the court of appeals to be examined in light of
Yount v. State, 853 S.W.2d 6 (Tex. Crim. App. 1993), in which we held that a defendant who
requested a jury instruction on a lesser-included offense could not later complain that his
conviction of that offense was barred by limitations. For the foregoing reasons, I respectfully
dissent.
Filed: March 18, 2015
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