Keith Cornell Haynes v. the State of Texas

In the Court of Appeals Second Appellate District of Texas at Fort Worth ___________________________ No. 02-23-00342-CR ___________________________ KEITH CORNELL HAYNES, Appellant V. THE STATE OF TEXAS On Appeal from Criminal District Court No. 1 Tarrant County, Texas Trial Court No. 1495333 Before Sudderth, C.J.; Bassel and Walker, JJ. Memorandum Opinion by Chief Justice Sudderth  MEMORANDUM OPINION I. Introduction A jury found Appellant Keith Cornell Haynes guilty of capital murder by intentionally or knowingly causing the death of Kenishia Walker and Baby Walker by shooting Kenishia Walker (who was pregnant with Baby Walker1) with a firearm and by committing the two murders during the same criminal transaction. See Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 19.03(a)(7)(A); Lawrence v. State, 240 S.W.3d 912, 914 (Tex. Crim. App. 2007). The State waived the death penalty, and the trial court sentenced Haynes to imprisonment for life without parole. See Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 12.31(a)(2). On appeal, Haynes raises four issues: (1) the evidence was insufficient to show that he was the person who murdered Walker and Baby Walker; (2) the trial court erred by preventing him from effectively exercising his peremptory challenge to an alternate juror; (3) the trial court abused its discretion by admitting State’s Exhibit 117, a photograph of the entrance wound behind Walker’s ear, because the photograph was too gruesome; and (4) the trial court abused its discretion by admitting State’s Exhibit 133, a photograph of Walker in her bloodied pajamas, because that photograph was also too gruesome. 1 Although Baby Walker was not yet born, for purposes of the Texas Penal Code, he was an “individual”: “‘Individual’ means a human being who is alive, including an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.” Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 1.07(a)(26). 2 We hold that the evidence was sufficient to support Haynes’s conviction, Haynes did not preserve any complaint regarding how the alternate jurors were selected, and the trial court did not abuse its discretion by admitting State’s Exhibits 117 and 133. We overrule Haynes’s four issues and affirm the trial court’s judgment. II. Background On the morning of Good Friday 2017, Walker’s nearly nine-year-old son, Andrew,2 went upstairs to her bedroom and found her uncharacteristically still in her bed. After trying to awaken his mother without success, Andrew pulled the covers back and saw a bloody hole in her head. At first Andrew tried to find his mother’s cell phone so that he could call the police, but it was gone. He then ran to his neighbor’s townhome, relayed to her what he had seen, and told her that his mother was dead. The neighbor, Candace Howerton, called 911. Officer Timothy Dillon, a first responder who investigated the scene, found a projectile under the pillow beneath Walker’s head and a shell casing on the floor, but he did not find a weapon. The medical examiner determined that the cause of Walker’s death was a gunshot wound to the head and that the manner of her death We use a pseudonym to protect the child’s identity. See McClendon v. State, 643 2 S.W.2d 936, 936 n.1 (Tex. Crim. App. [Panel Op.] 1982). 3 was homicide. The medical examiner further determined that the cause of Baby Walker’s death was “intrauterine fetal demise due to maternal death.” On appeal, Haynes asserts that the evidence is insufficient to show that he was the person who shot and killed Walker and Baby Walker. III. Issues We address Haynes’s sufficiency complaint first. We then address his contention that the trial court erred in the manner that alternate jurors were selected. Lastly, we address Haynes’s argument that the trial court abused its discretion by admitting two photographs over his Rule 403 objection that the probative value of the photographs was substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice. See Tex. R. Evid. 403. For the reasons given below, we overrule all of Haynes’s issues. A. Sufficiency of the Evidence In Haynes’s first issue, he asserts that the evidence is insufficient to show that he was the person who shot Walker, killing both her and Baby Walker. Specifically, Haynes contends that the evidence does not clearly place him at Walker’s residence at the time the shooting occurred. He also points out that the handgun used to kill Walker belonged to someone else, Jonathan Hill, and that Haynes’s DNA was not found on the weapon. T