Texas's Court of Criminal Appeals Tells Dallas State Appeals Court Dallas Has Jurisdiction over Discovery Mandamus

What do you do if the Texas state trial court that convicts you won't let you see the Reporter's Record in your trial, so that you can't make a proper habeas corpus application? Your application is very unlikely to be granted if you can't point to the exact place in the record where the law was violated to hold you. Philippe Padieu couldn't get his, so he sought a writ of mandamus against the trial court from the justices above that trial court-- in this case, they were in Dallas. The Dallas justices told him that they did not have the power to help him, that they didn't have jurisdiction. It appears that they said it because the point of Padieu's looking at the record was to make a habeas application, but for a person with a final felony conviction, the only court with jurisdiction over the application would be the Court of Criminal Appeals. Since Padieu's mandamus was, in their view, related to a habeas application, it was a CCA matter and not for them.
In a per curiam opinion, that is, an unsigned opinion, the CCA required the Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas (Don't confuse this with the federal Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.) to consider Padieu's mandamus petition. The CCA noted that no habeas petition had yet been made for Padieu, and said his situation was like a person who was seeking post-conviction DNA testing. Under the DNA testing statute, trial courts continue to have jurisdiction over such matters, even if the point of them generally was to generate evidence for a habeas application over which the CCA alone would have jurisdiction.
Philippe Padieu v. Court of Appeals of Texas, Fifth District, No. AP-76,727 (Tex. Crim. App., Jan. 9, 2013) (orig. proceeding) (per curiam).

Jurisdictional Anomalies of Texas's Courts of Appeals

There are fourteen intermediate courts of appeals in Texas. The areas they cover are called supreme judicial districts. I've previously discussed the strangeness of the First and Fourteenth Supreme Judicial Districts, which cover the same counties and whose work is divided between them generally by the Harris County District Clerk's office.
Hunt County, Texas is in both the Fifth and Sixth Supreme Judicial Districts. This means that you can appeal from there to either Dallas--Fifth S.J.D.-- or Texarkana-- Sixth.
Gregg, Rusk, Upshur and Wood Counties are Texas counties that are in both the Sixth and Twelfth Supreme Judicial Districts. The latter is in Tyler, the former, Texarkana.
Appeals of denials of the rights of property owners to drill oil and gas wells by the Railroad Commission, as well as other actions involving the government of the State of Texas are almost solely limited to the district courts of Travis County- county seat, Austin. Further appeals from there go to the Third Court of Appeals in Austin, unless the Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court equalizes the dockets of the state courts of appeals. This makes the Third Court of Appeals in some ways, a first among equals of the Courts of Appeals.