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Sunday, June 26, 2011

Courts - SCOTUS newest confrontation clause opinion

"Supreme Court says defendants may confront lab analysts who prepare reports" is the headline of Robert Barnes story June 23rd in the Washington Post. Some quotes:

The constitutional guarantee that a defendant be able to confront his accusers means prosecutors must produce even the technicians involved in the specific laboratory tests used in his trial, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

In a case involving a drunken driver from New Mexico, a majority of the court reinforced its recent decisions that fortified the right of defendants to cross-examine witnesses, established in the Sixth Amendment. * * *

Ginsburg wrote Thursday’s opinion, which said defendant Donald Bullcoming should have had the opportunity to cross-examine the lab analyst who provided the main evidence in his trial: a lab report showing his high blood-alcohol level. New Mexico prosecutors instead had called another analyst who had no role in performing the specific test.

“The Sixth Amendment does not tolerate dispensing with confrontation simply because a court believes that questioning one witness about another’s testimonial statements provides a fair enough opportunity for cross-examination,” Ginsburg said. * * *

For years, the court allowed the testimony of an absent witness if the judge found the statements reliable. But in the 2004 case Crawford v. Washington , the court said that testimony from an absent witness can be accepted only if the witness is unavailable and if the defendant had an opportunity to cross-examine.

Five years later — over objections from four justices who said the requirement would grind the criminal justice system to a halt — the court ruled that even laboratory reports could not be admitted without, as Ginsburg put it, “a live witness competent to testify to the truth of the statements made in the report.”

Thursday’s case was about who the live witness should be.

Ginsburg said it should be the person who prepared the report. She rejected the finding of the New Mexico Supreme Court that the machine that calculated Bullcoming’s blood-alcohol level was his real accuser and that the technician who recorded its findings was a “mere scrivener.”

Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog has a long analysis with this beginning:
A closely divided Supreme Court on Thursday continued its pattern of restricting prosecutors’ use of out-of-court statements to get criminal convictions, ruling that a report of a crime lab is valid evidence only if the technician who did the testing or observed it — not a substitute witness — is called to the stand. But the main opinion, and a concurring opinion, labored at length to stress just how little the Court had decided. It was clear that the Justices who controlled the outcome had been put on the defensive by an aggressive dissent — typical in this line of cases.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 26, 2011 09:42 AM
Posted to Courts in general