Carmell v. Texas

Carmell (defendant) was charged and convicted in 1996 of 15 counts of sexual offenses against his minor stepdaughter. These crimes occurred between 1991 and 1995, when the victim was between 12 and 16 years old, and ceased when the victim told her mother of the assaults. The victim had not told anyone of the assaults prior to telling her mother, and there was no corroborating evidence beyond the victim’s testimony. Prior to September 1993, Texas law provided that a defendant could only be convicted for such crimes if there was corroborating evidence or if the victim had informed another person of the offense within six months of the event, unless the victim was less than 14 years old. If these conditions were not met—if, for example, a 15-year-old was sexually assaulted, did not tell anyone, and could only offer uncorroborated testimony—the defendant would be acquitted. In September 1993, Texas amended this law to extend the exception to any victim under 18 years of age. Four of the counts of which Carmell had been convicted were implicated by this statutory change because those four counts had been committed when the victim was older than 14 but before the law had been amended. Carmell appealed his convictions for these four counts, alleging that the convictions could not stand under the old law and that applying the new law violated the Ex Post Facto Clause. The court of appeals rejected Carmell’s argument, holding that applying the amendment to the law retrospectively did not violate the Ex Post Facto Clause because the law had not changed the punishment or elements of the offense, but merely the competency of a class of witnesses. The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari.