TX: Flight from arrest on a warrant doesn’t permit litigating the validity of the warrant

There was an outstanding arrest warrant for defendant that justified the officer’s attempting to arrest him, and his flight justified his conviction for evading. The exclusionary rule doesn’t reach down to the actual validity of the warrant and the statute recognizes no exclusionary rule. The officer relied on it in good faith. Day v. State, 2020 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 1033 (Dec. 16, 2020):

Lastly, holding that the evading arrest statute does not incorporate exclusionary rule principles is consistent with our previous holdings that it is inappropriate to consider the lawfulness of an officer’s attempted arrest or detention as a suppression issue in evading cases. For example, in Woods v. State, the defendant, charged with evading detention, sought to challenge the lawfulness of his detention in a pre-trial motion to suppress. The defendant argued, much as Appellant does here, that he was initially detained illegally and the subsequent arrest should be suppressed under the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine. We rejected this argument because it was improperly raised in a pre-trial motion to suppress when it should have been the subject of a directed verdict. As we later said in York v. State, when the validity of an arrest or detention is an element of the charged offense, litigating the validity of the seizure as a suppression issue—either pretrial or during trial—is inappropriate. Instead, the issue should simply be litigated as part of the State’s case at trial. Implicit in this holding is the recognition that exclusionary rule principles are focused upon the evidence introduced at trial.

In this case, Appellant admitted to Heizer that he had an outstanding warrant from one jurisdiction; Heizer discovered a second warrant from another. And though Heizer said he was only worried about warrants out of his jurisdiction, Heizer was authorized to execute an arrest warrant from any county in Texas. Appellant argues, however, that the warrant doesn’t matter because the statute’s requirement that the arrest or detention must be “lawful” “means, at a minimum, that the detention must be lawful at its inception … if the initial detention was unlawful, it remained that way.” But even Appellant recognizes that the initial detention, that is, the detention that occurred before Appellant turned over his identification, was lawful. So, Appellant seems to argue that if the detention is illegal at any point before the flight, the statute is not satisfied. That’s a fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree argument, an application of an exclusionary rule principle that is not incorporated into the phrase “attempting lawfully to arrest or detain.” The question before the jury was the character of the detention at the moment of flight. The jury was entitled to find, from the evidence before it, that at the moment of flight, the officer was attempting to lawfully detain Appellant on the existing arrest warrant.