## Facts

- Carlos Jose Caceres was a medical-sales representative who sold medical devices and supplies to healthcare facilities.
- North Cypress Medical Center discovered that certain medical supplies and equipment were missing from the hospital.
- Caceres also sold the same types of supplies to Cypress OBGYN, a nearby clinic.
- After an investigation, the State charged Caceres with theft from the hospital based on the theory that the items Caceres sold to the clinic were the same items that went missing from the hospital.
- To show what the hospital had purchased (and thus what could have been stolen), the State offered the hospital’s purchase orders into evidence.
- The State called Chris Stewart, the hospital’s director of perioperative services, to sponsor the purchase orders.
- Stewart testified that his department generated purchase orders at or near the time the hospital purchased equipment, that creating purchase orders was a regular part of the hospital’s operations, and that the purchase orders were maintained electronically.
- Stewart also testified that he was not the formal custodian of the purchase orders because they were electronic records.
- Over Caceres’s hearsay objection, the trial court admitted the purchase orders as business records.
- The jury convicted Caceres of theft, and he appealed, challenging the admission of the purchase orders.

## Issues

1. Whether the trial court abused its discretion by admitting the hospital’s purchase orders under the business-records exception to the hearsay rule when the sponsoring witness was not the formal custodian of the electronically stored records.

## Decision

- The court of appeals affirmed the conviction.
- The court held the trial court did not abuse its discretion in admitting the purchase orders as business records because Stewart qualified as an “other qualified witness” under Texas Rule of Evidence 803(6).
- The court rejected the argument that the purchase orders were inadmissible merely because Stewart was not the designated custodian and the records were kept electronically.

## Legal Principles

- Under Texas Rule of Evidence 803(6), a record of a regularly conducted activity is not excluded as hearsay if the proponent shows it was made at or near the time by (or from information transmitted by) someone with knowledge, kept in the course of a regularly conducted business activity, and making such records was a regular practice of that activity.
- The business-records foundation may be supplied by “the custodian or another qualified witness”; the sponsoring witness need not have prepared the record, have personal knowledge of each entry, or hold the job title “custodian,” so long as the witness is familiar with how the records are created and maintained.
- That records are stored electronically does not, by itself, prevent admission under Rule 803(6); the focus remains on whether the testimony shows the records are created and kept as part of routine business activity.
- A trial court’s ruling admitting evidence is reviewed for abuse of discretion; an appellate court will uphold the ruling if it falls within the range of reasonable disagreement.

## Conclusion

The Fourteenth Court of Appeals affirmed Caceres’s theft conviction, holding that the hospital purchase orders were properly admitted under the business-records exception because the sponsoring witness, though not the formal custodian of the electronic records, was sufficiently familiar with the hospital’s purchase-order process and recordkeeping to qualify as an “other qualified witness” under Texas Rule of Evidence 803(6).


Caceres v. State, No. 14-15-00446-CR, 2016 Tex. App. LEXIS 6775 (2016)