Appeals court upholds Clay County murder conviction in case transferred from Fort Worth

A Clay County jury's murder verdict against Cindi Rawlins Baker will stand. An appeals court in Texarkana affirmed her conviction and 23-year prison sentence on Sept. 25, 2026, according to its written opinion. The case began in the same appellate district that hears Cooke County's appeals.

The opinion states that Baker was tried before a judge and jury in Clay County's 97th District Court for the death of her husband, James Wayne Baker II, who was fatally stabbed on Nov. 19, 2019. Jurors turned aside her claim that she acted in self-defense, found her guilty of murder and chose the prison term.

On appeal, Baker argued that the trial judge wrongly restricted what a domestic-violence expert could tell the jury. The appellate justices concluded the trial judge did not abuse that discretion and left the judgment in place, according to the opinion. The case was submitted to the court Sept. 3.

Cooke, Clay, Montague and Wichita counties all send their appeals to the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth, according to that court's jurisdiction listing. Its seven justices cover 12 counties and hear every criminal appeal except death-penalty cases. Baker's case left Fort Worth because the Texas Supreme Court reassigned it to balance caseloads among the state's appellate courts, the opinion says. Where the two courts' earlier rulings disagreed, the Texarkana court followed Second Court precedent.

The Fort Worth court has pointed to its own workload before. In an August 2024 funding request, it reported that its district population had grown from 1.4 million in 1983 to approximately 3.8 million. The court projected more than 1,000 filings for fiscal 2024, compared with 491 in 1983, while its bench remained at seven justices.

Appeals from across Texoma do not all land in one court. Grayson County cases go to the Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas, and Wilbarger County falls under the Seventh Court of Appeals in Amarillo, the courts' websites show.

Other regional criminal cases appear in public records, though those records do not show which appeals remained pending this fall. The Second Court's oral-argument archive lists Gregory Bell v. State, case 02-25-00143-CR, for April 21, 2026. State judiciary records list Joshua Thomas Fulbright's March 5, 2025, conviction in Clay County's 97th District Court with a sentence of life without parole, but they do not show the status of any appeal.

Statewide, intermediate appeals courts affirmed half of the criminal cases they disposed of in fiscal 2024, according to the judicial branch's annual statistical report. A defendant whose conviction is affirmed may petition the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, but that court decides for itself whether to take a case. Under Rule 66.3 of the Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure, it weighs factors such as conflicting rulings between appeals courts and important legal questions left unsettled. In fiscal 2025, the court granted 134 of the 873 petitions for discretionary review it disposed of, according to its annual report.

_Editor's note: Everyone charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law._