If you are an appellant, you know it isn't going to be a good day when the opinion in your case starts out like this:
“What a long, strange trip it’s been.”1 And, it doesn’t seem to be over due to the continued meanderings of the cause before us and the arguments posed by appellant and his counsel.----------1. “Truckin’” by the Grateful Dead.
Slip op. at 1.
It didn't get any better than that, and the fact that this was an appeal by a guy who pled guilty of the crime of delivering a controlled substance, after which he was convicted, may have had something to do with the court's treatment.
A Texas statute allowed the trial court to assess court costs -- in this case $2,000 -- to a defendant who defers adjudication of guilt and he claimed that this was a taking. According to the court, this issue was resolved long ago by the Texas Supreme Court, which in State ex rel. Pan Am. Prod. v. Texas City, 303 S.W.2d 780 (Tex. 1957), held that this did not violate the Texas Constitution's takings clause because this is "akin to a levy of a tax," and "[a]s such, it falls outside the scope of the takings clause." Slip op. at 5.
Not an entirely satisfactory rationale -- the guy's claim was essentially a regulatory takings claim, which means that by definition he was challenging the exercise of a power other than the government's eminent domain power as a de facto taking -- but come on, you knew this one wasn't going to go far, didn't you?
Denton v. State, No. 07-15-00181-CR (Tex. App. Oct. 8, 2015)
