Houston Criminal Lawyer - Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 3.03 Officers

Houston Criminal Lawyer - Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 3.03

Hey Brian Foley here. We're discussing Article 3.03 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure today. This one's gonna be really short, guys. It's funny to me sometimes; these sections that everybody, I guess all the lawyers who were writing the Code of Criminal Procedure back in 1965, felt like we needed. This is Article 3.03 - Officers. The general term "officers" includes both magistrates and peace officers. Thank you, thank you, Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, for making that so clear.

Art. 3.03. OFFICERS. The general term "officers" includes both magistrates and peace officers. Acts 1965, 59th Leg., vol. 2, p. 317, ch. 72

Why would they use "officers" to refer to either a judge or a peace officer? I really don't know. A magistrate means a judge. There are no—I've never found a citation to this; no lawyer has ever felt like this was important enough to cite anywhere. No one's ever been confused between peace officers and judges, but we sure got Article 3.03 helping us out every day as lawyers.

If you have any idea what you think this means, if there's a good distinction here, I suppose, you know, there are instances where public servants get an assault. On a public servant, that's a separate crime, but we use the word "public servant"; there's a specific definition there. There's another crime, assault on a peace officer. An interesting note here, different counties will charge this different ways.

In Montgomery County, a lot of times, they charge an assault on a peace officer, which is a second-degree felony; they'll charge that as assault on a public servant, which is a third-degree felony. And I'm not sure why that happens all the time either, but it's to the benefit of most of our clients. So, you know, we don't complain about that. I guess this is more of a complaint video for me. Come on, Texas Legislature, what are we doing with Article 3.03, the definition of officers?

If you've got an answer to this, I'd love to hear it, and we'll see if we think that's worthy of its own statute. But it is worthy of its own video because we're going over the whole Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, and I'm here to explain it to you guys. So, if you read this and you thought it was dumb, I agree, and we'll see you next time. Thank you.