Padron, Joe David

In the Court of Criminal
Appeals of Texas
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No. WR-62,917-02
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EX PARTE JOE DAVID PADRON,
Applicant

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On Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus
In Cause No. CR02004423-F(1)
In the 214th District Court
Nueces County
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YEARY, J., filed a dissenting opinion in which SCHENCK, P.J., and
FINLEY, J., joined.

This is a post-conviction application for writ of habeas corpus,
brought under Article 11.07. TEX. CODE CRIM. PROC. art. 11.07. The
Court grants Applicant relief based on one of his claims, albeit in a brief,
uninformative per curiam opinion. I would file and set this cause to
consider several questions that seem to me to have been glossed over.
PADRON – 2

Because the Court does not, I respectfully dissent.
I. BACKGROUND AND CLAIMS
In a trial conducted in 2004, Applicant was convicted of three
counts of capital murder, and the jury answered the special issues in
such a way that he was assessed three concurrent life sentences. His
conviction was affirmed on direct appeal. Padron v. State, No. 13-06-
00464-CR, 2008 WL 5575068 (Tex. App.—Corpus Christi Aug. 14, 2008)
(mem. op., not designated for publication).
In 2022, Applicant filed an initial post-conviction application for
writ of habeas corpus. Among the claims he has raised is that there is
new evidence which, when added to the evidentiary mix, would by clear
and convincing evidence cause his jury to have a reasonable doubt about
his guilt, entitling him to relief under Ex parte Elizondo, 947 S.W.2d
202, 209 (Tex. Crim. App. 1996). The convicting court has not
recommended that we grant relief under this so-called “actual
innocence” theory, and the Court today does not do that.
But the parties agree, and the convicting court recommends, that
relief be granted—and the Court today does grant relief—on one of
Applicant’s other claims: that the State unknowingly presented false
evidence in the form of testimony against Applicant from two out of the
three jailhouse snitches who testified at his trial, citing Ex parte Chabot,
300 S.W.3d 768, 771 (Tex. Crim. App. 2009).
No physical evidence tied Applicant to the offense. Applicant’s
conviction rested in part on the testimony of the three jailhouse snitches,
who claimed to overhear Applicant essentially admit to the offense while
in jail. And it was also supported by an eyewitness who claimed to have
PADRON – 3

recognized Applicant from the dome light of the getaway vehicle when
he removed his ski mask while getting into the back seat, immediately
after the shooting.
One of the three jailhouse snitches has since recanted his
testimony; and a second, though he has not recanted, has been seriously
impeached with new evidence to suggest that he may have made up his
trial testimony to curry favor with the prosecutor. Additionally, a law
professor has bolstered this recantation/impeachment evidence with
additional empirical evidence suggesting the unreliability of jailhouse-
snitch testimony in general, deriving from the advent of DNA technology
that purportedly now demonstrates how frequently such evidence leads
to false convictions. That is the evidence which undergirds Applicant’s
unknowing-use-of-false-evidence claim.
II. DISPOSITION
I am unwilling at this juncture to join the Court’s per curiam
opinion granting relief. For most of the history of this litigation, the
State seems to have vigorously opposed granting relief—right up until
shortly before the convicting court ultimately issued its recommended
findings of fact and conclusions of law. The State’s arguments were far
from frivolous. Nevertheless, the Court is content to follow the
convicting court’s recommendation without any discussion of several
issues that seem to call for greater scrutiny.
I would not grant relief without first filing and setting the cause
for more in-depth treatment of the issue and oral argument. We are,
after all, the court of return in non-death-penalty capital cases. TEX.
CODE CRIM. PROC. art. 11.07, § 3(a). And we are not bound by the State’s
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belated confession of error in the case. See Ex parte Nicholson, 634
S.W.3d 743, 744 (Tex. Crim. App. 2021) (Yeary, J., dissenting)
(observing that “we are not bound by” a State’s confession of error and
that this “principle is even more compelling in the context of a post-
conviction writ of habeas corpus, in which this Court is the ultimate fact-
finder”) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted).
With respect to the false evidence claim, I am not certain it is
appropriate to characterize the jailhouse-snitch testimony in this case
as “false.” The snitch who recanted has had a history of vacillating with
respect to the information he has supplied about this case over the years.
The second snitch has not recanted at all; he has merely been
impeached. And there has been no evidence presented specifically to
show that the third snitch’s testimony was false at all, other than the
law professor’s general testimony. That testimony provides little, it
seems to me, that the average juror’s intuition would not already tell
him about the level of skepticism that should be brought to bear upon
such testimony.
Under the circumstances presented here, the Court should be
reluctant to accept the convicting court’s conclusion that the State
inadvertently used false evidence. The worst that can be said here is
that it might have been false. But there is also still a significant
possibility that it might have been true. And when the balance is just
even—when there is not at least a clear preponderating imbalance in
favor of the Applicant’s claim of falsity—then we should defer to a jury’s
resolution of questions of historical facts. See Ukwuochu v. State, 613
S.W.3d 149, 157 (Tex. Crim. App. 2020) (“[O]ur cases have been
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consistent in signaling that to meet the falsity prong, some ‘definitive or
highly persuasive evidence’ is needed to undermine the truthfulness of
the evidence adduced at trial.”) (quoting Ex parte De La Cruz, 466
S.W.3d 855, 867 (Tex. Crim. App. 2015)).
What is more, even the convicting court in this case has concluded
that the State’s use of the allegedly “false” evidence was “unknowing[.]”
Majority Opinion at 1. Because the inadvertent use of false evidence
involves no complicity on the part of the State, granting relief on that
basis does not really implicate the fairness of the process. Rather, the
determination to grant relief in such a case ought to be focused on
whether the alleged false evidence influenced the result of the
proceeding. Granting relief in such a case should rest upon the rationale
that we are simply unwilling to accept the result of a trial at which such
misleading evidence was presented. The accuracy of the result rather
than the fairness of the process should be the touchstone.
But accuracy of result is also the impulse behind granting habeas
corpus relief based on an Elizondo (so-called) “actual innocence” claim.
And these false evidence claims are not the same as Elizondo claims. I
tend to agree with former Judge Price’s assessment that, “[u]nless we
are to allow our false evidence jurisprudence unduly to encroach upon
our actual innocence jurisprudence, . . . when it comes to claims of the
inadvertent use of false evidence, we must not be overly liberal in how
we characterize ‘false’ evidence.” Ex parte Robbins, 360 S.W.3d 446, 465
(Tex. Crim. App. 2011) (Price, J., concurring). Demonstrations of falsity,
particularly when the Court addresses inadvertent false evidence
claims, should—at a minimum—be fairly compelling. See Ukwuochu,
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613 S.W.3d at 156 (“To prove the falsity prong of a false-evidence claim,
the record must contain some credible evidence that clearly undermines
the evidence adduced at trial, thereby demonstrating that the
challenged evidence is, in fact, false.”).
The convicting court has not recommended that we grant “actual
innocence” relief in this case. In my view, then, we should not be too
hasty in concluding that the new evidence presented to undermine the
jailhouse-snitch testimony from trial has definitively shown that the
challenged trial testimony was “false.” Before accepting that claim, the
Court should be truly convinced of its falsity, not merely persuaded of
the existence of a risk that it might have been false.
III. CONCLUSION
This is an old conviction, 1 for a very serious offense. We should
not set it aside precipitously. I would file and set this application for a
more transparent consideration and resolution of the issues identified
above. Because the Court does not, I respectfully dissent.

FILED: April 16, 2025
PUBLISH

1 Applicant waited eighteen years to file this, his initial post-conviction

application for writ of habeas corpus. That is a long time. His habeas counsel
has suggested reasons for why it took so long to marshal the evidence to
support his claims. See Ex parte Diaz Hernandez, 683 S.W.3d 426, 427 (Tex.
Crim. App. 2024) (Yeary, J., dissenting) (laches “includes neglect for an
unreasonable and unexplained length of time under circumstances permitting
diligence, to do what in law, should have been done”) (citations and quotation
marks omitted). But the Court should not wholly ignore the fact that the
passage of time tends to erode the reliability of evidence and testimony in
deciding this case.