In our fight against Texas’s harassment statute, and against content-based restrictions on protected speech generally, Citizen Lane and I have filed motions for rehearing in Barton and Sanders (links to PDFs of motions).
On Sanders, we learned after the Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the State had dismissed the case in the trial court before the Court of Criminal Appeals had ruled. So we filed a Suggestion of Mootness with the CCA, because if the case had been dismissed it was moot and the court should not have decided it.
Now that it has won (for the moment) in the Court of Criminal Appeals, the State has argued in the trial court that its own motion for dismissal was ineffective because the habeas appeal was pending.
To understand this issue, you need to know that an application for writ of habeas corpus initiates a new case, separate from the criminal case. Typically the clerk will give (and always should give) the habeas corpus case a new cause number. If an appeal in the habe…
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