Hawkins v. State

I join the opinion of the Court, but I write separately to make a few additional comments.

Someone once said that the moral test of a society is how it treats those in the dawn of life, its children, those in the twilight of life, the aged, and those in the shadows of life, the sick and the disabled. The Texas Legislature responded to that moral challenge, in part, by enacting Penal Code § 22.04, which was, and is, intended to protect the young, the old, the sick, and the disabled from abuse at the hands of those very people who are supposed to take care of them.

At the time of the offense in…