Texas high court rejects convicted murderer former officer Roy Oliver's appeal

AUSTIN (CBSDFW.COM) — The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected an appeal filed by a former Balch Springs police officer convicted of murder, meaning he will serve out his sentence.

Roy Oliver, who previously served as a police officer with the department in Balch Springs, was convicted of murder after he shot Jordan Edwards, 15, in April 2017 as the teen was leaving a party with his brother and friends.

He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine.

After the shooting, a Balch Springs internal affairs investigator told Oliver that he could be fired if he did not provide a statement. 

However, in the 1967 Garrity v. New Jersey case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that statements of police officers given under the threat of termination and that the use of such statements violated the officer's right against self-incrimination. 

At the trial, Oliver's lawyers argued that the burden to prove a Garrity statement was not used by the prosecution fell to the state. The trial court disagreed, and a court of appeals affirmed that ruling.

Oliver then filed a petition for discretionary review in October 2020, which the Court of Criminal Appeals initially granted. 

The petition raised three grounds for review, of which the court limited to only the second. After consideration of the parties' briefs and court records, however, the court unanimously concluded in an opinion delivered by Justice Barbary Hervey that their decision to grant review was improvident and dismissed Oliver's appeal.

Justice Kevin Yeary said in a concurrence joined by Justice Michelle Slaughter that he agreed with the ruling, but wished that the court had voted to grant Oliver's first ground for review.

In Oliver's first ground, his lawyers argued that the court of appeals failed to hold Oliver's statement made to Dallas police investigators after the shooting was also made involuntarily under Garrity. 

Yeary wrote that Oliver's statements to Dallas investigators were possibly made in the same context as his statements to Balch Springs internal affairs and that it would have been "jurisprudentially significant" for the court to consider whether or not those statements were given involuntarily.