707 S.W.3d 424

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas. Filed:1/22/2025

In State v. Cuarenta, our client had been prosecuted for a Class C misdemeanor traffic violation—speeding—which could have cost him his commercial driver’s license and his livelihood.

After a trial, the trial court put him on “deferred disposition,” which would have saved his license. But that wasn’t technically legal. You can’t get deferred disposition after a trial.

The state appealed, and the issue on appeal was whether the State could even appeal; if they could, we were dead in the water. But article 44.01 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure gives the State permission to appeal only in very narrow circumstances, including when there is an illegal sentence. So the question in the court of appeals was whether a Class C deferred disposition is a sentence. The appeal was to the Tenth Court of Appeals in Waco, but it was administratively transferred to the Seventh Court of Appeals in Amarillo.

Waco had held in another case that a deferred disposition is a sentence; Amarillo had previously held that it is not. And when an appeal is transferred that way, the transferee court is supposed to follow the transferor court’s law. So Amarillo grudgingly heard the appeal instead of dismissing it, and granted relief.

Mr. Cuarenta filed a petition for discretionary review, which was granted, and we joined his appellate lawyer—Shannon Flanigan of Bryan, Texas—on the brief. The Court of Criminal Appeals agreed with us: the State cannot appeal a grant of deferred disposition.

But the State could take another shot at it by filing an application for writ of mandamus; the Court of Criminal Appeals mentioned this possibility in its opinion. Back in the Waco Court of Appeals, the State tried that. We responded that mandamus was not appropriate, because the State had not asked the trial court first for the relief it was asking the Waco Court of Appeals to order. The Waco court agreed with us, and denied mandamus.

By that time it was too late for the trial court to do anything on the case. Mr. Cuarenta gets to keep his license.

Three things:

First, as our law-school Civil Procedure professor told us on the first day, procedure is everything. This appeal wasn’t about the facts. It was purely about what the rules mean.

Second, don’t take no for an answer. The State relied on the prior decision of the Waco Court of Appeals that a deferred disposition was a sentence that it could appeal. Mr. Cuarenta didn’t accept that as the correct answer. This all would have ended much earlier and worse for him if Shannon Flanigan hadn’t been willing to appeal even in the face of the Waco Court’s adverse precedent. It all would have ended badly for him if we hadn’t looked for a procedural fault in the State’s mandamus petition.

Third, everything matters. A speeding ticket seems like no big deal to most of us, but it was the most important thing in our client’s life, so we litigated his appeal like it was the most important thing to us, and we didn’t give up, and we got him what he needed.

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