## Facts

- Albert Hernandez Torres was indicted on multiple counts of delivering cocaine arising from controlled buys involving undercover officer John Dabbs.
- Torres and Dabbs had been friends for about twelve years and previously worked together at a body shop.
- Dabbs repeatedly asked Torres to help obtain drugs, using their friendship and Dabbs’s status as a police officer.
- Dabbs initiated the idea that Torres would procure and deliver drugs and made repeated requests before Torres agreed.
- Dabbs assured Torres he would be helping law enforcement by “getting drugs off the street” and suggested Torres would not be breaking the law.
- Torres introduced Dabbs to a local drug dealer, arranged sales, and—at Dabbs’s insistence—handled drugs and money during the transactions, conduct constituting “delivery” under Texas law.
- The record reflected Torres had no prior history as a drug dealer, and Dabbs acknowledged Torres was not a drug dealer before Dabbs’s involvement.
- Torres filed a pretrial motion to dismiss based on entrapment; the trial court denied it.
- Torres entered open guilty pleas while preserving his entrapment claim for appeal; the trial court convicted and sentenced him.

## Issues

1. Whether the evidence was legally sufficient to permit a rational factfinder to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Torres was not entrapped under Texas Penal Code § 8.06.

## Decision

- The court of appeals reversed the trial court’s judgments of conviction.
- The court held the State’s evidence was legally insufficient to disprove entrapment beyond a reasonable doubt.
- The court rendered a judgment dismissing all charges rather than remanding for a new trial.
- Because the case was resolved on entrapment and legal insufficiency, the court did not reach Torres’s remaining appellate issue(s).

## Legal Principles

- Under Texas Penal Code § 8.06, entrapment is established when a defendant commits an offense because a law enforcement agent induced the conduct by persuasion or other means likely to cause persons to commit the offense; merely providing an opportunity is not entrapment.
- Texas applies an objective entrapment test focusing on the nature of police conduct rather than the defendant’s predisposition.
- Once entrapment is raised by evidence, the State must disprove entrapment beyond a reasonable doubt.
- Repeated pressure, exploitation of a personal relationship, and misleading assurances by an officer can constitute inducement exceeding the mere provision of an opportunity.
- When an appellate court finds the evidence legally insufficient to support conviction (including insufficiency to rebut an affirmative defense the State must disprove beyond a reasonable doubt), the proper remedy is reversal and rendition of a judgment of dismissal, not retrial.

## Conclusion

The court of appeals concluded that the undisputed record showed the undercover officer originated and persistently pressed the drug-delivery scheme, using friendship and assurances of legality on a person with no prior drug-dealing history; because the State could not, on this evidence, disprove entrapment beyond a reasonable doubt, the convictions were reversed and the indictments dismissed.


Torres v. State, 980 S.W.2d 873 (Tex. App.—San Antonio 1998, pet. ref’d)