The following is a summary of selected criminal opinions issued by the Third Court of Appeals from January 2025. The summary is an overview; please review the entire opinions. The subsequent history is current as of June 5, 2025.
CONFESSIONS – VOLUNTARINESS: Trial court did not abuse its discretion in suppressing defendant’s statements made to investigators during a recorded interrogation following a polygraph exam.
State v. Cielencki, 706 S.W.3d 634 (Tex. App.—Austin 2025, pet. ref’d). Cielencki was charged with the offense of aggravated sexual assault of a child. During the investigation, Cielencki took a polygraph exam. The exam and interrogation that immediately followed lasted nearly eight hours, with the exam itself taking approximately two hours. Cielencki was informed at the conclusion of the exam that he had failed it. The interrogating officer proceeded to ask Cielencki for a “rational explanation” as to why. The officer explained that polygraphs work by “detecting memories stuck in the amygdala in the brain” that a person might interpret as “intuition,” and he suggested that the incident must have happened without Cielencki remembering it. About three and a half hours after Cielencki arrived at the station, the officer was joined by another officer, both of whom expressed their desire to help Cielencki “remember.” For the first six and a half hours, Cielencki maintained that he was innocent, but eventually, as the interrogation continued, he confessed. Cielencki filed a motion to suppress, arguing that his confession was not voluntary. The trial court agreed and granted the motion. Its findings of fact on voluntariness focused on the length of the interview, the officers’ interrogation techniques, and Cielencki’s behavior and mental state throughout the interview. The appellate court affirmed, concluding that the record supported the trial court’s finding that Cielencki’s statements were “the product of fear, intimidation,” and “coercion,” which “removed any possibility of voluntariness.” The court explained that throughout the interrogation, Cielencki indicated that he understood the interrogating officer to be “an expert in polygraphs” who was telling him that “the polygraph was detecting the physical manifestations of memories in his body for a memory that he could not remember.” Thus, “[t]he line of questioning that led to his confession did not rely on accusing Cielencki of being a liar or hiding information from the interviewers,” which were typical interrogation techniques, “but rather, the conversation was articulated as the interviewers helping him access a memory that he could not remember.” The court was unable to conclude that the trial court abused its discretion in suppressing Cielencki’s confession as involuntary. Justice Kelly wrote a concurring opinion, discussing the difficulty of reviewing a trial court’s voluntariness decision.
EVIDENTIARY SUFFICIENCY – Definition of “lawfully released from custody”: Evidence was sufficient to prove that defendant was “lawfully released from custody” to support defendant’s conviction for bail jumping and failure to appear.
Ogbuehi v. State, 706 S.W.3d 689 (Tex. App.—Austin 2025, no pet.). Ogbuehi was convicted of the offense of bail jumping and failure to appear. A person commits that offense “if he intentionally or knowingly fails to appear in accordance with the terms of his release” after being “lawfully released from custody, with or without bail, on condition that he subsequently appear.” On appeal, Ogbuehi asserted that the evidence was insufficient to establish that he was lawfully released from custody because his initial arrest was illegal. The court, in construing the statutory language, disagreed. It explained that, although the Penal Code does not define the phrase “released from custody,” the Court of Criminal Appeals has determined that the phrase as used in the statute includes freeing “a person from a more restrictive form of custody” but leaving “some restrictions on the person’s freedom of movement.” Further, although the Penal Code does not define the term “lawfully,” it does define the phase “unlawful” as meaning “criminal or tortious or both,” and the common meaning of the term lawful is “[n]ot contrary to law; permitted by law.” Thus, the court concluded that “the use of the phrase ‘lawfully released from custody’ in this context means that an individual’s release from custody was done through a lawful process or authorized by a legal authority as opposed to someone escaping from custody or otherwise removing themselves from custody through a process not authorized by law.’” In this case, bail bonds related to Ogbuehi’s arrests were admitted into evidence and showed that the bonds were made to secure his release, and both his former attorney and his mother testified that he had been released on bond before failing to appear at trial. Given the reasonable inferences that could be drawn from this evidence, the court concluded that the evidence was sufficient to establish that Ogbuehi had been lawfully released from custody.