§ 1053.1 Automatic appeal of judgments holding statutes unconstitutional in criminal actions.

When a district court rules that a state law is unconstitutional in a criminal case, that decision gets automatically sent up to the Court of Criminal Appeals for review. This happens without anyone needing to file a request. The higher court simply steps in to check the ruling.

There's one exception. If the Court of Criminal Appeals has already ruled that same law unconstitutional in an earlier case, then this automatic review doesn't happen again. The issue has already been settled, so there's no need to repeat the process.

The district attorney handles this kind of appeal. It's based on what's called a "reserved question of law," which means the legal issue about the law's constitutionality gets set aside and sent to the higher court for a final answer, separate from the rest of the criminal case.