Staley, James Irven, III

12/11/2025

PD-0202-25

  1. “When assessing a probable-cause nexus, should Texas adopt the distinction in Commonwealth v. Fernandes, 148 N.E.3d 361 (Mass. 2020) (cert. denied), between (1) stranger-on-stranger crimes (like State v. Baldwin, 664 S.W.3d 122 (Tex. Crim. App. 2022)) and (2) household-violence homicides where affidavits describe fraught relationships and where devices found in the same home as the relationships and crimes will likely reveal a ‘clear window into the nature’ of those relationships and thus the offense (like here)?”
  2. “Given the trial court’s finding that officers relied on the warrant in good faith, the evidence was admissible under the Fourth Amendment and excludable— if at all—only under Texas’s statutory rule. Did the court of appeals violate Holder v. State, 639 S.W.3d 704 (Tex. Crim. App. 2022) (disavowing Love), by applying the constitutional-error harm standard of rule 44.2(a)?”
  3. “Did the court of appeals violate Long v. State, 203 S.W.3d 352 (Tex. Crim. App. 2006), by reversing a conviction for evidentiary error without engaging with the remaining evidence beyond a bald statement that ‘other evidence’ existed? Further, given that the unaddressed evidence overwhelmingly supported the conviction, was the error harmless under any standard?”

Staley suffocated his girlfriend’s two-year-old son in the home they had all shared for two months. Police obtained a warrant to seize and search electronic devices in the home. In support of the warrant, the police affidavit recounted that: 

  • the girlfriend found the toddler dead on the floor, with blood on his face and a bloody pillow inside his crib;
  • weeks earlier the toddler sustained facial bruising while in Staley’s care and when his girlfriend was absent;
  • the girlfriend documented the bruising with a digital photo taken in the home;
  • digital evidence stored on one device may be stored on other devices through synching; and
  • the affiant believed he would find devices containing visual depictions of physical abuse and communications between Staley and his girlfriend.

The police discovered evidence on the devices, including a GoPro video that recorded Staley striking the sleeping toddler on the head on the same day he got the bruise. Staley moved to suppress the evidence, arguing the affidavit didn’t justify a search of electronic devices. The trial judge denied the motion, and Staley was convicted in a jury trial.

On appeal, Staley re-urged his complaint about the warrant affidavit. The court of appeals held that the affidavit lacked a sufficient nexus between the devices and the offense, as required by State v. Baldwin, 664 S.W.3d 122, 134 (Tex. Crim. App. 2022), to yield probable cause to search them. The State argued there was probable cause that evidence of the relationship between Staley and the deceased relevant to Staley’s state of mind at the time of the offense would be found on the devices, particularly given the girlfriend’s prior photo. But the court of appeals rejected the inference that Staley’s devices would contain such evidence as “tenuous.” The court acknowledged that, in Commonwealth v. Fernandes, Massachusetts upheld a warrant to search a digital camera found in the home where Fernandes killed his girlfriend based in part on the inference that the camera might contain evidence relevant to the nature of their relationship and motive for the killing. But the court of appeals found Fernandes distinguishable, pointing to Fernandes’ pending assault case against his girlfriend and his confession to killing her. The court of appeals said upholding this search would authorize the search of electronic devices in every domestic-violence murder or justify their search simply because such devices exist.

As for harm, the State (in reliance on Holder) urged application of the nonconstitutional-error standard. It reasoned that the trial court found the search was conducted in good-faith reliance on a warrant, obviating a Fourth Amendment claim and leaving only a Tex. Code Crim. Proc. art. 38.23 claim, to which the nonconstitutional standard applied. But the court of appeals looked to the procedural context of Holder and held that the harmless error standard depended upon the kind of error the appellant asserted. Because Staley (unlike Holder) invoked the Fourth Amendment, the constitutional harm standard applied.

The State argues that the Baldwin nexus is satisfied because, unlike with crimes against strangers, household homicides expand the fair probability of finding relationship/state-of-mind evidence on electronics in the place where the murder took place—the home. This is especially true, the State contends, where (as here and in Fernandes) the affidavit describes “already-fraught relationships” in the home that preceded the offense. The State highlights that the cell phone found insufficiently connected to the offense in Baldwin was located off-sight. It also criticizes the court of appeals for failing to credit inferences the magistrate was entitled to make based on Staley’s live-in dating relationship with his girlfriend and shared care of the toddler. The State also contends that the court of appeals too narrowly limited Holder to state constitutional claims. That interpretation ignored that Holder disavowed Love, which involved a federal constitutional (Fourth Amendment) claim that, because of the good-faith exception, Holder said should have been resolved under the non-constitutional error standard. The State also details the number of ways that the court of appeals’ harm analysis fails to contend with overwhelming evidence of guilt.