Had a pretrial hearing over a year ago on an intoxication manslaughter case. During the hearing I realized that the case had been poorly investigated and we needed to do a lot more work so I dismissed the case after the hearing and had an ivestigator gather evidence for the DPS trooper. Reindicted in December as a murder and Manslaughter. The previous Judge at the conclusion of the pretrial hearing wanted some case law before he made up his mind on the admissibilty of some of the defendant's stmts. He never made finding because he wanted case law from me. Defendant is saying collateral estoppel applies and I just want to make sure????Doesn't it have to be final decision by the Jury or judge and even then can't the trial Judge overrule a prior decision by a judge who did the pretrial hearing based on the evidence offered in trial? We have a number of Judges with varing amounts of criminal law backgrounds so some rulings are different.

You should look at Guajardo v. State, 109 S.W.3d 456, 460 (Tex. Crim. App. 2003) ("The burden is "on the defendant to demonstrate, by examination of the record of the first proceeding, that the [factual] issue he seeks to foreclose was actually decided in the first proceeding.")

Judge Meyers' concurrance discusses the alternative theory that a pre-trial ruling will not support collateral estoppel because there was no jeopardy.

That's the point--if you never had a fact finding in the previous hearing, what fact finding is estopped now? The only way estoppel applies is to say that the issue was previously decided, but it does not appear that that happened in your case