The underlined portion of the foregoing quotation is revealing. The Dabney Court acknowledged that accepting the appellant’s argument would cause a huge upset to the system. All statutes permitting jury waivers would be void. Thus, an untold number of convictions would be void. Of course, this is not a proper basis for an appellate-court ruling. The question of whether a constitutional provision’s explicit language must be respected does not depend on whether doing so would invalidate particular legislation. In his dissenting opinion in Farris, Justice Goodman recognized that accepting Mr. Farris’s argument “would be a major disruption to the Texas criminal justice system.”57 But, he essentially said, this should not matter when it comes to deciding appeals: Some will argue that an acknowledgment by the Court of Criminal Appeals of the mandate contained in article I, section 10 of the Texas Constitution requiring jury trials in all prosecutions for Old Code felony crimes would be a major disruption to the Texas criminal justice system and would place Texas in a unique position among the other state in the Union—I agree on both counts. Texas is large, and Texas has never shied away from taking actions that distinguish it from other states. The fact that this striking, mandatory requirement stems from the earliest constitution of the Republic of Texas only emphasizes the importance that Texans place on the mandate for and the right to jury trials. 58
57
58
Farris v. State, 581 S.W.3d at 929 (Goodman, J., dissenting). Id. at 929-30. 30
