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Friday, June 26, 2009

Courts - More on yesterday's SCOTUS rulings

"Strip Searches and the Law: A smart compromise balances the rights of students with the needs of school administrators" is the title to an editorial today in the Washington Post.

Also from the WAPO, Robert Barnes has a story headed "Defendants Have Right To Confront Analysts of Forensics, Court Rules."

Adam Liptak writes in the NY Times under the heading "Justices Rule Lab Analysts Must Testify on Results ." A quote:

“The confrontation clause may make the prosecution of criminals more burdensome, but that is equally true of the right to trial by jury and the privilege against self-incrimination,” Justice Scalia wrote.

“The sky will not fall after today’s decision,” he added.

But that is not how prosecutors saw it. “It’s a train wreck,” Scott Burns, the executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, said of the decision.

“To now require that criminalists in offices and labs that are already burdened and in states where budgets are already being cut back,” Mr. Burns said, “to travel to courtrooms and wait to say that cocaine is cocaine — we’re still kind of reeling from this decision.”

Mr. Burns said complying with the ruling would be particularly tough in large rural states with a single crime laboratory and in old cases where the analyst has died or moved away.

The decision came in the wake of a wave of scandals at crime laboratories that included hundreds of tainted cases in Michigan, Texas and West Virginia. William C. Thompson, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, said those scandals proved that live testimony from analysts was needed to explore potential shortcomings in laboratory reports.

“The person can be interrogated about the process, about the meaning of the document,” Professor Thompson said. “The lab report itself cannot be interrogated to establish the strengths and limitations of the analysis.”

In February, the National Academy of Sciences issued a sweeping critique of the nation’s crime labs. It concluded, for instance, that forensic scientists for law enforcement agencies “sometimes face pressure to sacrifice appropriate methodology for the sake of expediency.”

Cross-examination of witnesses, Justice Scalia wrote, “is designed to weed out not only the fraudulent analyst, but the incompetent one as well.” He added that the Constitution would require allowing defendants to confront witnesses even if “all analysts always possessed the scientific acumen of Mme. Curie and the veracity of Mother Teresa.”

[More] See this WSJ Law Blog entry, "Coming Soon: A Little More Courtroom Time for CSI Workers," by Ashby Jones

Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 26, 2009 09:28 AM
Posted to Courts in general