Bradley Jacobs Shumway v. Texas

Whether the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas denied Mr. Shumway due process of law when it retroactively applied a newly announced and judicially created exception to over 150 years of common law precedent requiring evidence of corpus delicti in order to sustain Mr. Shumway’s conviction following a trial that the same court concluded contained no evidence of corpus delicti. See Rogers v. Tennessee, 532 U.S. 451 (2000). Whether the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas, through retroactive application of a change to its common law, can constitutionally do what the Ex Post Facto Clause prohibits the Texas legislature from doing, namely retroactively alter the legal sufficiency standard to require less or different testimony than the law required at the time of the commission of the offense to sustain a conviction. See Carmell v. Texas, 529 U.S. 513 (1999).