Full Opinion

Opinion issued August 25, 2026 In The Court of Appeals For The First District of Texas ———————————— NO. 01-25-00442-CR ——————————— JEVON DONTE MOORE, Appellant V. THE STATE OF TEXAS, Appellee On Appeal from the 212th District Court Galveston County, Texas Trial Court Case No. 24-CR-0342 MEMORANDUM OPINION A jury convicted the appellant of murder and assessed punishment at twenty years’ confinement. The appellant brings three issues on appeal. We affirm. The Offense The appellant and his friends, Brianna and Jalishai, wanted some marihuana. They found a post on Instagram indicating a dealer they knew, Aemen, was selling that day. When Aemen arrived to complete the deal, the appellant and his friends walked up to speak with him while he stayed in the car. The appellant and his friends negotiated payment methods and amount with Aemen. While Jalishai and Brianna were speaking with Aemen, the appellant wandered off for a minute or so. Before payment was made, the appellant walked back up to the car, stuck his arm inside, and tried to grab the marihuana from Aemen’s lap. Aemen reached down toward his pants. The appellant and Jalishai produced pistols and pointed them at Aemen. The appellant fired several rounds, fatally wounding Aemen. The appellant and his friends ran away without the marihuana. Sufficiency to Reject Self-Defense The State’s version of the shooting came primarily from Jalishai’s testimony. The appellant presented a somewhat different story. The appellant testified the shooting was the result of an attempted drug deal, but by his telling Aemen drew a gun first, for no obvious reason, and only after Aemen drew did the appellant draw and shoot. The jury was charged on the law of self-defense but still convicted the 2 appellant. In his first point the appellant claims the evidence was insufficient to support the jury’s rejection of his self-defense claim. The appellant makes two specific claims of insufficiency. First, he claims “the State did not present evidence sufficient to rebut his self-defense claim.” The appellant claims the State “had to produce evidence which established beyond a reasonable [doubt] that [the appellant] did not act in self-defense, which it did not do.” For this assertion the appellant cites “Saxton v. State, 776 S.W.2d 685, 686 (Tex. App—Houston [14th Dist.] 1989).” Conspicuously absent from the appellant’s citation is Saxton’s petition history. The Fourteenth Court’s opinion in Saxton was reversed on the exact point of law the appellant cites it for. The resulting Court of Criminal Appeals’ opinion became the cornerstone of modern self-defense sufficiency law, which holds the exact opposite of what the appellant argues—the State need not affirmatively rebut a self-defense claim. “[The State’s burden] is not a burden of production, i.e., one which requires the State to affirmatively produce evidence refuting the self-defense claim, but rather a burden requiring the State to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. ” Saxton v. State, 804 S.W.2d 910, 913 (Tex. Crim. App. 1991) (emphasis added). On sufficiency review we do not ask whether the State produced enough evidence to refute self-defense, we ask only whether the State produced evidence allowing a rational trier of fact to find the elements of the offense beyond a 3 reasonable doubt and reject self-defense. See Braughton v. State, 569 S.W.3d 592, 608–09 (Tex. Crim. App. 2018). Self-defense has objective and subjective elements: The defendant must subjectively hold the defensive belief described in the applicable statute, and that belief must be reasonable. Lozano v. State, 636 S.W.3d 25, 32 (Tex. Crim. App. 2021). Here, as is typically the case, the only evidence of the appellant’s subjective belief came from the appellant’s testimony. On sufficiency review we must view the evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict and defer to the jury’s credibility findings and weighing of evidence. Brooks v. State, 323 S.W.3d 893, 899 (Tex. Crim. App. 2010). Applying that standard, we must defer to the jury’s implied finding that the appellant’s testimony of his subjective defensive belief was not credible. The appellant’s second claim of insufficiency is that “conflicts within the State’s witnesses’ testimony as to the physical evidence and the reenactment of the shooting rendered its case inherently improbable and therefore insufficient to sustain the conviction.” By this the appellant seems to be noting that his version of events comports with some physical evidence. But the Court of Criminal Appeals’ opinion in Saxton also rejected this sort of sufficiency attack: “Defensive evidence which is merely consistent with the physical evidence at the scene of the alleged offense will not render the State’s evidence insufficient since the credibility determination of 4 such evidence is solely within the jury’s province and the jury is free to accept or reject the defensive evidence.” Saxton, 804 S.W.2d at 914. Because the jury was not obliged to believe the appellant’s testimony about his state of mind at the time of the shooting, the evidence was sufficient to support the jury’s rejection of his self-defense claim. We overrule the appellant’s first point. Unpreserved Claims In his second point the appellant claims the trial court erred by allowing Jalishai’s “coerced and changed testimony” into evidence. The appellant points out that Jalishai’s testimony differed from the version of events she told police shortly after the shooting. The appellant speculates that this change in story was based on coercion, which, the appellant claims, made her trial testimony an inadmissible involuntary statement. In his third point the appellant complains about the admission into evidence of three search warrants. He claims they were overly prejudicial and inadmissible under Rule of Evidence 403. In neither point does the appellant cite a location in the record where he objected to the admission of the complained-of evidence, and we cannot find such objections. Because these matters were not raised in the trial court they present nothing for our review. See TEX. R. APP. P. 33.1(a)(1) (requiring complaint be raised in trial court as prerequisite for appellate review). We overrule points two and three. 5 Conclusion We affirm the trial court’s judgment. Clint Morgan Justice Panel consists of Justices Guerra, Gunn, and Morgan. Do not publish. TEX. R. APP. P. 47.2(b). 6