Legal News

Courts May Use Words of a Dying Man Talking, High Court Rules

By Ashby Jones

It sounds like a bad law school hypothetical, one ripped from a 1980s Mel Gibson movie.

The victim of a violent crime gives statements at the crime scene, and then dies before trial. Can those statements be used to convict the suspect?

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled, by a 6-2 vote (Justice Elena Kagan recused herself), that yes, such statements can be used. Their use did not run afoul of the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, which states: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him. . . . “

Click here for the Washington Post story on the ruling; here for the NYT story; here for coverage from Scotusblog; here for the ruling itself.

The ruling, by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, represents a step back from recent rulings affirming that the witness must be present and available for cross-examination, according to the WaPo story.

But the court’s majority drew a distinction between statements made during an emergency created by a crime event and statements made when police are investigating the crime.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a scathing dissent, calling the majority’s reasoning “so transparently false that professing to believe it demeans this institution.”

Justice Sotomayor, shot back, accusing Scalia of “misreading” the rules the court set for when statements could be admitted as evidence. “The dissent criticizes the complexity of our approach, but we, at least, are unwilling to sacrifice accuracy for simplicity,” Sotomayor wrote for her colleagues.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sided with Scalia, but wrote separately.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 01, 2011 (boomark / email).