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Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Courts - SCOTUS continues parsing confrontation clause

SCOTUSblog today has a good roundup of articles on yesterday's SCOTUS decision in Michigan v. Bryant (ILB entry here).

In addition, see this entry from Joan Biskupic's Supreme Court Blog that begins:

Justice Scalia lost it Monday in Michigan v. Bryant. As the majority ruled that a gunshot victim’s dying words to police could be used at trial against the alleged shooter, Scalia erupted. “[T]oday’s decision is not only a gross distortion of the facts. It is a gross distortion of the law—a revisionist narrative … at least where emergencies and faux emergencies are concerned.”
And Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog wrote last evening on an oral argument set for Wed. in Bullcoming v. New Mexico. It is a long entry, here is how it starts:
The Supreme Court has been working its way through a series of sequel cases since its landmark ruling in 2004 in Crawford v. Washington declared that prosecutors may not constitutionally put before a jury at a criminal trial an out-of-court statement if the witness who made it cannot take the stand, unless the statement was tested earlier by something equivalent to cross-examination. It has not been an easy judicial task: just this week, Justice Antonin Scalia — the most fervent supporter of the Crawford principle — lashed out bitterly in dissent when the majority created a new exception to this Sixth Amendment confrontation right, in Michigan v. Bryant.

Now, the Court is about to confront what seems like the simplest of sequel issues: if a written piece of evidence (here, a crime lab report) is to be offered in evidence to help prove guilt, who must be called to the witness stand to be questioned about it? Treating the author of such a lab analysis as the accuser, for Sixth Amendment confrontation purposes, the Court is being asked to decide whether a substitute witness — someone else on the lab’s staff — can stand in for the actual accuser. But there is another way to look at the issue: if a machine in the lab is actually the accuser, does it make a constitutional difference which lab analyst, familiar with the machine and how it works, takes the stand?

Posted by Marcia Oddi on March 1, 2011 09:43 AM
Posted to Courts in general