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Date: 10-30-2020

Case Style:

Maurice Glenn Willis Sr. v. The State of Texas

Case Number: 02-20-00022-CR

Judge: Lee Ann Dauphinot

Court: Court of Appeals Second Appellate District of Texas at Fort Worth

Plaintiff's Attorney: Steven W. Conder
Joseph W. Spence

Defendant's Attorney:


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Description:

Fort Worth, TX - Criminal defense lawyer represented defendant Maurice Glenn Willis Sr. charged with capital murder.




The trial court adopted the State’s proposed findings of fact and conclusions of
law, finding that Appellant shot and killed Lorenzo Watts while the two were arguing
about money Watts owed Appellant. LaTonya Reed saw Appellant shoot and kill Watts.
Appellant first shot Watts in the chin. As Watts crawled toward a nearby bedroom,
Appellant shot him once in the back. While Watts tried to fend off Appellant’s attack
with the gun, Appellant shot him multiple times in the chest. During the attack,
Appellant repeatedly asked Watts where he kept his drugs and money. After shooting
Watts, Appellant pulled a mattress over Watts’s body. After Watts was dead, Appellant
cut his head with a kitchen knife.
At the time of the murder, Appellant lived in a back room attached to Watts’s
house. After the murder and in the middle of the night, Appellant took various items
belonging to Watts to Joyce Grimes’s house.
1Willis v. State, No. 02-00-00318-CR (Tex. App.––Fort Worth 2001, no pet.) (not
designated for publication).
3
The police found Watts dead in his bedroom, covered with a mattress. His home
had been ransacked, but there was no evidence that the perpetrator had himself been
injured in the attack on Watts. Appellant gave the police inconsistent statements
regarding whether he had heard gunshots.
In ruling on the fourth DNA motion, the trial court found it was unlikely that
any blood recovered from the crime scene belonged to anyone other than Watts since
Watts had been shot in the face, back, and chest; cut on his head with a knife; and
covered with a mattress. The trial court found in summary that “[s]ignificant non-DNA
evidence” (Reed’s eyewitness testimony and Appellant’s possession of Watts’s
property) established that Appellant had shot and killed Watts while trying to obtain his
drugs and money.
The trial court also found that Appellant had filed three prior motions requesting
DNA testing on the items collected and possessed by the Fort Worth Police
Department, including the items upon which he currently seeks testing. Appellant
appealed the denial of his second motion for DNA testing to this court, and we affirmed
the denial order.
2
In that second motion, Appellant did not seek testing of one of the
items he now seeks to have tested: a blue hand towel found under one of the tires of
Watts’s car that had been abandoned on the I-35 service road.
2Willis v. State, No. 2-06-091-CR, 2008 WL 2780666, at *3 (Tex. App.—Fort
Worth July 17, 2008, pet. ref’d) (mem. op., not designated for publication).
4
The trial court concluded that Appellant did not satisfy his burden of establishing
“that any exculpatory DNA testing results would create a reasonable probability of his
non-conviction given the non-DNA evidence connecting him to . . . Watts’[s] murder.”
Additionally, the trial court concluded that this fourth motion should be denied under
the law-of-the-case doctrine “because the appellate court has already resolved the issue
of whether [Appellant] meets the reasonable probability of non-conviction requirement
in a previous appeal.” Finally, the trial court concluded, “The probative value of any
touch DNA recoverable from the towel . . . is minimized since [it] could have been
touched by any other person who had been in contact with [it] before . . . Watts’[s]
murder.”
Standard of Review and Applicable Law
A convicting court may order postconviction DNA testing only upon making
statutorily enumerated findings, including that “the convicted person establishes by
preponderance of the evidence that the person would not have been convicted if
exculpatory results had been obtained through DNA testing.”
3 Such a finding “is an
application-of-law-to-fact question that does not turn on credibility and demeanor and
is therefore reviewed de novo.”
4
In doing so, we generally review the entire record, that
3State v. Swearingen, 478 S.W.3d 716, 720 (Tex. Crim. App. 2015).
4Rivera v. State, 89 S.W.3d 55, 59 (Tex. Crim. App. 2002).
5
is, all of the evidence that was available to, and considered by, the trial court in making
its ruling, including testimony from the original trial.5
But Chapter 64 motions are also subject to the law-of-the-case doctrine, which
promotes “judicial consistency and efficiency.”6 According to that doctrine, “an
appellate court’s resolution of questions of law in a previous appeal are binding in
subsequent appeals concerning the same issue.”7 Therefore, “when the facts and legal
issues are virtually identical, they should be controlled by an appellate court’s previous
resolution.”8
Law-of-the-Case Doctrine Applies to All But Blue Towel
In the appeal from the trial court’s denial of Appellant’s second motion for
postconviction DNA testing, a majority of this court held that
if the material was tested and excluded [Appellant] as the donor, this result
would not establish his innocence because the donor of the material is not
necessarily the person—or “lone attacker”—ultimately responsible for
murdering [Watts]. The donor of the material could be [Watts] or any
other person who had previously been in, on, around, or somehow in
contact with the items that [Appellant] seeks to be tested and left behind
DNA material.
9
5Asberry v. State, 507 S.W.3d 227, 228 (Tex. Crim. App. 2016).
6Swearingen, 478 S.W.3d at 720.
7
Id.
8
Id.
9Willis, 2008 WL 2780666, at *3.
6
Thus, this court has already determined the same factual and legal issue we are
confronted with here as to the same items sought to be tested, with the exception of
the blue towel. Therefore, as to those items identified in prior DNA motions, the trial
court ruling on Appellant’s fourth DNA motion correctly determined that the law-ofthe-case doctrine applied and that this court’s prior opinion controls.10
Potential Exculpatory Results From Blue Towel Would Not Entitle Appellant to
Testing
This court’s prior opinion did not consider whether Appellant showed a statutory
right to testing of the blue towel, which police collected from underneath one of the
tires on Watts’s abandoned car.11 The car had been parked by the service road of I-35.
Willie Howze testified that a man named Gilbert had told him about seeing the car, and
Willie had driven by the car at least a couple of times. One of the times Willie drove by
the car, he saw one of Watts’s ex-girlfriends and her boyfriend walking away from the
car, but he did not see them touch or do anything with the towel.
The trial court did not abuse its discretion by denying Appellant’s fourth DNA
motion as to the blue towel because he did not show by a preponderance of the
evidence that he would not have been convicted if exculpatory results had been
10See Swearingen, 478 S.W.3d at 720.
11See Fletcher v. State, 214 S.W.3d 5, 7 (Tex. Crim. App. 2007) (noting that an
appellate court may take judicial notice of its own records in the same or related
proceedings involving the same or nearly same parties).
7
obtained through DNA testing. “Exculpatory results” means only results that exclude
the defendant as the donor of the tested biological material.
12 But exculpatory results
do not relieve a defendant from showing the likelihood that he would not have been
convicted if the fact-finder had been able to consider and to weigh this exculpatory
evidence against the other available evidence.13 The probative value of DNA testing
that excludes a defendant is diminished if there is a significant possibility that the DNA
was deposited by an innocent person or if multiple potential contributors could have
handled the item sought to be tested.14
The blue towel was found outside the car, underneath one of the wheels, on an
I-35 service road near downtown Fort Worth. Even if Appellant’s DNA were not found
on the towel, the towel could have been blown there or already been in that location
when the car was parked. Moreover, even if the towel had fallen out of the car, that car
belonged to Watts. The same reasoning applies as with the other evidence Appellant
sought to have tested: “[t]he donor of [any] material could be [Watts] or any other
person who had previously been in, on, around, or somehow in contact with the” blue
12Hall v. State, 569 S.W.3d 646, 655–56 (Tex. Crim. App. 2019); Reed v. State, 541
S.W.3d 759, 774 (Tex. Crim. App. 2017).
13Reed, 541 S.W.3d at 774; Holberg v. State, 425 S.W.3d 282, 287 (Tex. Crim. App.
2014).
14Dunning v. State, 572 S.W.3d 685, 693 (Tex. Crim. App. 2019); Hall, 569 S.W.3d
at 658.
8
towel. We therefore hold that the trial court did not err by denying Appellant’s motion
for DNA testing of the blue towel.

Outcome: We have carefully considered all the evidence in the record, prior determinations
by this court, and findings and conclusions reached by the trial court. Applying the
appropriate standard of review, we hold that the trial court’s denial of Appellant’s fourth motion for postconviction DNA testing is supported by the record. We therefore affirm the trial court’s order.

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