A Houston-area juvenile judge must once again decide whether a man accused of capital murder as a teen — but not charged until he was an adult — will be tried in adult criminal court, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office alleged a 16-year-old — referred to in court documents by his initials, “J.J.T” — played a role in the 2020 death of Melchor Gutierrez while robbing him during an alleged drug deal. Gutierrez was found dead in his truck with multiple gunshot wounds to the head.
But J.J.T. wasn't arrested until well after he turned 18. A juvenile judge transferred his case to adult criminal court. Then, upon appeal, judges threw his case out altogether because of the timing of his indictment.
The state’s highest court for civil and juvenile matters now says the reasoning used by both those lower courts was flawed, and the juvenile court must hold a hearing again to decide whether J.J.T.’s case should be transferred to adult court.
“We decline to attempt to harmonize the juvenile court’s findings to assume a correct legal basis for its ruling or to substitute ourselves as the factfinder,” Justice Jane Bland wrote for the court.
The state argued in court documents and oral arguments that there wasn’t enough clear evidence to initiate a case against J.J.T. before he turned 18 — both because of the facts of the case and a sheriff’s deputy’s own preferences during the investigation. The juvenile court agreed with prosecutors and ruled J.J.T. could be tried as an adult.
The First Court of Appeals in Houston disagreed and dismissed the case altogether. Judges there ruled prosecutors could have charged J.J.T. when he was a minor because of Tovar’s statements implicating his friend and video evidence showing three males leaving the crime scene.
What the Texas Supreme Court takes issue with, according to its opinion, is how the juvenile court — and the majority of the Houston appeals court — interpreted the rules around whether children can be tried in juvenile or adult court.
Just because prosecutors may have had probable cause to arrest and charge J.J.T. before he turned 18 doesn’t necessarily mean they could reasonably act on those beliefs, the court ruled.
Assistant Harris County District Attorney Melissa Stryker said her office will continue trying to prove that successfully in juvenile court.
"My office is pleased that the Texas Supreme Court agreed with the State’s position that the First Court of Appeals misinterpreted and misapplied the relevant statutory provisions concerning certification and transfer of a juvenile offender for prosecution in an adult criminal court, and that the opinion by the Texas Supreme Court provides clarity regarding those statutes," Stryker wrote in an email to KERA News.
The high court's ruling may give the now-21-year-old J.J.T. an opportunity to avoid his case being transferred to adult court — a legal venue with fewer alternatives — or it could give the state another chance to successfully make its case.
Jerry Acosta, J.J.T.'s attorney, said in an email to KERA his team is still working on a request for a rehearing in the high court.
"My initial reading of the opinion leads me to believe the Court is giving the State a second chance to establish their case which at first read seems fundamentally unfair and unnecessarily duplicitous," Acosta said.
Police initially arrested then-17-year-old Alfonso Hernandez Tovar and accused him of Gutierrez’s murder. Then in November 2020, Tovar told authorities he was at the crime scene, but didn’t shoot — it was J.J.T. who shot Gutierrez and ran off with the stolen weed, he said.
Prosecutors called that a “self-serving” and “blame-shifting” statement that didn’t give them enough evidence to go after J.J.T. It wasn’t until 2022 — about six months after J.J.T. turned 18 — that prosecutors were able to get evidence from J.J.T.’s phone that allegedly showed he and Tovar were together before, during and after the time of the murder.
J.J.T. first denied being involved, but he eventually told authorities that while he was at the scene of the crime and grabbed the weed, it was Tovar who allegedly killed Gutierrez. Still, J.J.T. was charged with capital murder as an alleged accomplice to the felony.
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office wanted the case moved from juvenile court to adult criminal court. Juvenile judges can transfer juvenile criminal cases to adult court if it wasn’t feasible for the state to pursue the case in juvenile court for a reason outside the state’s control.
Alternatively, the state must prove that after its own due diligence, it didn’t have probable cause to proceed with the case before the juvenile’s 18th birthday — and new evidence has been found since the minor turned 18.
The point of those rules, according to case law, is to prevent an adult from being prosecuted for something they allegedly did as a child if there were opportunities for the state to deal with the issue when that person was still a child.
Juvenile courts can also consider more factors in their decisions as opposed to adult courts — factors like the child’s maturity, history in the juvenile system and the possibility of rehabilitation. The child might also get an opportunity to serve time in juvenile detention with a chance of probation.
Getting tried in adult court also ups the stakes. Life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years would be the only possible sentence for J.J.T. if he were found guilty of capital murder as an adult.
It’s less severe than life in prison without the possibility of parole at all or the death penalty, which an alleged adult offender would face, but Steven Halpert with the juvenile division of the Harris County Public Defender’s Office told KERA News after oral arguments last year that it’s not much better.
“It's essentially a death sentence,” Halpert said. “We put a little bow on it and say, ‘you can get out after 40 years.’ But nobody's surviving that.”
Got a tip? Email Toluwani Osibamowo at tosibamowo@kera.org. You can follow Toluwani on X @tosibamowo.
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