Davis, Monique Yolanda

In the Court of Criminal
Appeals of Texas
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No. WR-95,190-01
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EX PARTE MONIQUE YOLANDA DAVIS,
Applicant

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On Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus
In Cause No. 1171765-A
In the 174th District Court
Harris County
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YEARY, J., filed a dissenting opinion in which FINLEY, J., joined.

Gerald Goines, then a Houston Police Department narcotics
officer, purportedly provided cash to a confidential informant who was
said by him to have purchased hydrocodone from Applicant at her home.
Based on an affidavit from Goines, which included these allegations, a
magistrate issued a warrant to arrest Applicant and search her home
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for illegal drugs. The warrant was executed the same day at Applicant’s
home, and she was found at that time, by Goines and other officers, to
be in possession of cocaine and other suspected illegal drugs. 1
Applicant was charged with possession of less than one gram of a
controlled substance (cocaine), a state jail felony offense. See TEX.
HEALTH & SAFETY CODE § 481.115(b) (establishing possession of less
than one gram of a Penalty Group One controlled substance as a state
jail felony). She pled guilty and, in June of 2008, the convicting court
sentenced her to 180 days confinement in the county jail. See TEX. PENAL
CODE § 12.44(a) (permitting state jail felonies to be punished as Class A
misdemeanors in the interest of justice). 2
In March of 2019, nearly eleven years after Applicant’s plea, the
Harris County District Attorney released a letter to Applicant. This
letter disclosed that Goines had been relieved from duty and was under
criminal investigation. According to Applicant’s unsworn declaration,
she was unaware of Goines’s record of misconduct until she was
contacted by the Harris County Public Defender’s Officer in December
of 2022.
Applicant subsequently filed an original application for a writ of
habeas corpus in August of 2023. In a supplemental writ application,
Applicant complains that: (1) she was denied due process when false

1In addition to cocaine, Goines’s incident report states that law
enforcement recovered “62 TABS OF SOMA / 120 TABS OF XANAX AND 27
UNKOWN TYPE TABLETS” from Applicant’s home.

2 Applicant long ago completed her sentence, but she has established

collateral consequences “sufficient to establish ‘confinement’ so as to trigger
application of art. 11.07.” Ex parte Harrington, 310 S.W.3d 452, 457 (Tex. Crim.
App. 2010).
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evidence was used by the State to induce her guilty plea; and (2) her
guilty plea was involuntary.
Today, the Court grants Applicant relief based on her second
claim—involuntary plea—citing only Ex parte Mathews, 638 S.W.3d 685
(Tex. Crim. App. 2022), and Ex parte Coty, 418 S.W.3d 597 (Tex. Crim.
App. 2014), as authority. Majority Opinion at 1. For the reasons
explained below, I do not believe that Applicant is, at least yet, entitled
to relief on either ground she alleges.
I. BACKGROUND: COTY, MATHEWS, AND BARNABY
Coty established a rule for this Court’s consideration of false
evidence claims on habeas, that when an applicant in a drug case
satisfies a five-part test focused on misconduct by a forensic analyst, the
Court will presume that the testimony and/or evidence presented
against the applicant by the analyst is false, subject of course to rebuttal.
418 S.W.3d at 605. Then, in Matthews, this Court explicitly extended
the Coty presumption to “cases involving police officers who display a
pattern of mendacity in obtaining drug arrests and convictions[.]” 638
S.W.3d at 690. So, when an applicant demonstrates that (1) a police
officer who (2) “has committed multiple instances of intentional
misconduct in another case or cases” (3) is the same state actor as in the
current case, (4) has previously committed “the type of misconduct that
would have affected the evidence in the applicant’s case[,]” and (5) acted
in the applicant’s case “within roughly the same period of time as the
other misconduct[,]” the Court will infer that evidence derived from that
officer is false. Id. at 690–91. When the State fails to rebut that
inference, the Court will go on to inquire whether the use of that
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presumptively false evidence was material. Id. at 689; Coty, 418 S.W.3d
at 605.
Still, the applicant bears the burden of establishing the
materiality of the presumptively false evidence. Mathews, 638 S.W.3d
at 691. To that end, in Ex parte Barnaby, the Court explained that when
an applicant claims she has entered an involuntary plea based on the
use of false evidence, a necessary question that arises is “whether there
is a reasonable likelihood that [the false evidence] affected the
defendant’s decision to plead guilty[.]” 475 S.W.3d 316, 325 (Tex. Crim.
App. 2015). In other words: “Would the defendant, knowing of the falsity
of the evidence, still have plead guilty or would [s]he have insisted on
going to trial? If [s]he would have chosen trial, the false evidence was
material.” Id. at 325–26.
II. INVOLUNTARY PLEA
Applicant alleges that she “did not have sufficient awareness of
the relevant circumstances surrounding the entry of her plea to make it
knowing and voluntary.” With respect to this ground, she argues: (1)
that the information alleged in Goines’s warrant affidavit should be
presumed false under Coty and Mathews and; (2) that, because Goines
was a member of the prosecution team, knowledge of his “practice of
presenting false charges against numerous people” is imputed to the
State, which had an “obligation to reveal such information to the
defense.” The State’s failure to disclose that information to her, she
alleges, rendered her plea involuntary. Though she does not say so,
Applicant takes this notion of imputed knowledge from Brady v.
Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963).
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However, as I recently wrote in Ex parte Thomas, before granting
relief in this situation, the Court should decide whether Brady applies.
Ex parte Thomas. 690 S.W.3d 682, 685 (Tex. Crim. App. 2024) (“To reach
the conclusion that the State violated its disclosure obligations under
Brady, the Court would have to decide (1) that Brady requires the State
to disclose exculpatory evidence prior to a negotiated plea, and (2) that
Goines’s record of misconduct in other cases constituted exculpatory
evidence in this case.”). But the Court declines to undertake that
inquiry. Instead, it merely states that “[t]he State and the trial court
both recommend granting relief” on Applicant’s claim of involuntary
plea under Coty and Mathews, and that it agrees. If the Court means to
endorse Applicant’s Brady argument by its opinion today, then it should
say so explicitly. If not, then it is incumbent on the Court to explain by
what rationale it concludes, despite rejecting her Brady argument, that
Applicant’s plea was involuntary. Because the Court does neither, I
cannot join its opinion.
III. FALSE EVIDENCE
Applicant also alleges that if she “had known that Officer Goines
[had] used false evidence to obtain a search warrant, she would not have
pleaded guilty, but would instead have chosen the option of filing a
motion to suppress evidence, or even opted for a jury trial.” Ultimately,
as I recently observed in Ex parte Walker, an applicant could possibly be
entitled to relief on a ground like the one Applicant has presented to this
Court. See Ex parte Walker, ___ S.W.3d ___, Nos. WR-95,387-01 & WR-
95,387-02, 2024 WL 4610792, at *2 (Tex. Crim. App. Oct. 30, 2024)
(Yeary, J., dissenting) (noting that the Court has yet to determine
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whether the Coty/Mathews presumption should apply to false
statements in a warrant affidavit). But to reach that conclusion would,
in my view, require the Court, at least, to explicitly extend the reach of
Coty, Mathews, and Barnaby. See id. (“Before granting Applicant relief,
the Court should consider whether the Coty/Mathews inference of falsity
and the Barnaby standard of materiality ought to apply in
circumstances such as these—and if so, how.”). Accordingly, I would file
and set Applicant’s case.
IV. CONCLUSION
Applicant contends that she is entitled to postconviction habeas
relief because, she alleges, (1) her due process rights were violated when
the State used false evidence to induce her guilty plea, and (2) her plea
of guilty was involuntary. I do not rule out that Applicant may
ultimately be entitled to relief on either or both of the grounds she
raises. But there are important predicate questions of law that the Court
ought to address before deciding whether to grant Applicant relief on
either of her claims. I would file and set Applicant’s involuntary plea
claim to determine whether, under Brady, the State was obligated to
disclose Goines’s history of misconduct prior to her plea, irrespective of
the individual prosecutor’s knowledge of that history. I would also file
and set Applicant’s false evidence claim to determine whether, and if so
how, the Coty/Mathews test and Barnaby should apply to cases in which
the applicant does not claim that the evidence of her guilt was false.
Because the Court grants relief without first addressing both of these
important threshold questions, as may be necessary, I respectfully
dissent.
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FILED: February 5, 2025
PUBLISH