Legal Commentary

Supreme Court Takes A Bite out of Confrontation Clause

By Jeralyn

In a split decision today, the Supreme Court has ruled a dying man's identification of his killer is admissible evidence and does not violate the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause. The opinion (available here) was written by Justice Sotomayor.

Covington’s identification and description of the shooter and the location of the shooting were not testimonial statements because they had a “primary purpose . . . to enable police assistance to meet an on-going emergency.”

Justices Ginsberg and Scalia were among the dissenters. Scalia's dissent is particularly harsh. He points out that the statement was not taken for safety in an emergency situation, but for investigation of a crime:

"Today's tale...is so transparently false that professing to believe it demeans this institution,"

[More...]

Scalia continues:

In its vain attempt to make the incredible plausible, however—or perhaps as an intended second goal—today’s opinion distorts our Confrontation Clause jurisprudence and leaves it in a shambles. Instead of clarifying the law, the Court makes itself the obfuscator of last resort. Because I continue to adhere to the Confrontation Clause that the People adopted, as described in Crawford v. Washington, 541U. S. 36 (2004), I dissent.

Unfortunately, the majority, while giving lip service to the protections of the Confrontation clause, manages to mangle them, using the rubric of the "primary purpose" analysis:

Even where such an interrogation is conducted with all good faith, introduction of the resulting statements at trial can be unfair to the accused if they are untested by cross-examination. Whether formal or informal, out-of-court statements can evade the basic objective of the Confrontation Clause, which is to prevent the accused from being deprived of the opportunity to cross-examine the declarant about statements taken for use at trial.

When, as in Davis, the primary purpose of an interrogation is to respond to an “ongoing emergency,” its purpose is not to create a record for trial and thus is not within the scope of the Clause. But there may be other circumstances, aside from ongoing emergencies, when a statement is not procured with a primary purpose of creating an out-of-court substitute for trial testimony.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on February 28, 2011 (boomark / email).