520
Opinion of the Court
Weaver v. Graham, 450 U. S. 24, 31 (1981) ("The critical question [for an ex post facto violation] is whether the law changes the legal consequences of acts completed before its effective date"). What are at stake, then, are the four convictions on counts 7 through 10 for offenses committed between June 1992 and July 1993 when the victim was 14 or 15 years old and the new Texas law was not in effect.
Petitioner appealed his four convictions to the Court of Appeals for the Second District of Texas in Fort Worth. See 963 S. W. 2d 833 (1998). Petitioner argued that under the pre-1993 version of Article 38.07, which was the law in effect at the time of his alleged conduct, those convictions could not stand, because they were based solely on the victim's testimony, and the victim was not under 14 years old at the time of the offenses, nor had she made a timely outcry.
The Court of Appeals rejected petitioner's argument. Under the 1993 amendment to Article 38.07, the court observed, petitioner could be convicted on the victim's testimony alone because she was under 18 years old at the time of the offenses. The court held that applying this amendment retrospectively to petitioner's case did not violate the Ex Post Facto Clause:
"The statute as amended does not increase the punishment nor change the elements of the offense that the State must prove. It merely 'removes existing restrictions upon the competency of certain classes of persons as witnesses' and is, thus, a rule of procedure. Hopt v. Utah, 110 U. S. 574, 590 . . . (1884)." Id., at 836.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied discretionary review. Because the question whether the retrospective application of a statute repealing a corroboration requirement has given rise to conflicting decisions,5 we granted peti-5 Compare Utah v. Schreuder, 726 P. 2d 1215 (Utah 1986) (finding ex post facto violation); Virgin Islands v. Civil, 591 F. 2d 255 (CA3 1979) (same), with New York v. Hudy, 73 N. Y. 2d 40, 535 N. E. 2d 250 (1988) (no ex post
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