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).