A new and interesting case on the not-for-truth end run

Stu Dedopoulos, a blog reader who diligently keeps me informed, has told me about Orlando v. Nassau County District Attorney’s Office, an interesting Second Circuit case decided this week.  In a 2-1decision, the majority (Circuit Judge Droney, joined by Circuit Judge Jacobs), upheld a Confrontation Clause challenge on habeas.  I think this was probably the right decision, but it’s a tough case, and there’s a very fine dissent by District Judge Shea.  The case is a good illustration of the difficulties that arise when the prosecution tries to justify what appears at first glance to be a blatant Confrontation Clause violation by citing an arguably plausible not-for-the-truth basis of admissibility.  Evidence teachers might find that it’s good fodder for an exam question.

Mark Orlando was accused of paying Herva Jeannot to murder Bobby Calabrese, allegedly to avoid paying a $17,000 gambling debt.  The police, believing that Orlando and Jeannot had been together the night of the shooting (in Island Park, NY, a few miles from where I grew up), interviewed them separately.  Orlando at first said he and Jeannot had gone together to pay Calabrese, they did so, and then left, without incident.  After some hours, one of the detectives returned repeatedly, eventually telling Orlando that Jeannot had given what they felt were “truer versions” of the events, and that Jenanot had admitted shooting Calabrese but said that Orlando had paid him to do it.  At that point, Orlando, who had said he was afraid of Jeannot, gave another statement, to the effect that after he paid Calabrese Jeannot unexpectedly shot him and took the money.

Orlando and Jeannot were both charged with murder.  The trials were severed, quite properly given Jeannot's confession, which plainly could not be introduced against Orlando for the truth of what it asserted.  But at Orlando's trial, the prosecution, over objection, presented evidence of all of the encounters between Orlando and the police described above – Orlando's first statement, the later interchange between Orlando and the detective, including the detective's summary of and apparent endorsement of Jeannot's statement admitting to the shooting and implicating Orlando, and Orlando's second statement acknowledging being present at the time Jeannot shot Calabrese.  Orlando was convicted, lost on appeals in the New York system and before the district court on his habeas petition, but won in the court of appeals.

I think the majority was right to emphasize that Jeannot was effectively a witness against Orlando; his statement was plainly testimonial.  I think it's also clear that, despite a limiting instruction that the trial judge gave, it's virtually certain that the jury would consider Jeannot's statement for the truth of its assertion that Orlando paid for the killing.  And, as the majority points out, in this case the evidence included not only the substance of the accusatory confession but also an effective endorsement by the police, a factor not present in Bruton.

But the case is not quite like Bruton.  There, the statement was admissible against the confessor, Evans, not against his co-defendant, Bruton.  The Supreme Court held that a limiting instruction would be ineffective; severance was required.  Here, there already was severance.  But the argument is that the evidence was admissible against Orlando for some reason other than to prove the truth of what it asserted.  And it is clear under Tennessee v. Street, which was reaffirmed by Crawford, that a statement does not pose a Confrontation Clause problem when it is admitted to prove some proposition other than the truth of a matter it asserted.

So what was that other proposition?  I take it as given that the prosecution had good grounds to show that Orlando gave shifting exculpatory stories; a person is more likely to shift stories if he is guilty and is adjusting to new information than if he is innocent. The explanation given by Orlando in the police station, and by counsel at trial, is that he was afraid of Jeannot, and so unwilling to say that Jeannot had shot Calabrese until he heard that Jeannot had confessed to doing so.  (Orlando had no objection to the jury hearing that Jeannot had confessed to being the triggerman.)  The fact that Orlando had also heard that Jeannot accused Orlando of having paid for the murder, and that the police were disposed to believe Jeannot, might make this account less plausible; it might suggest that Orlando changed his story only under pressure of knowing he was being credibly accused, and that he came up with an account that was exculpatory but fit the evidence that he knew the police had in hand (proof that he had the debt to Calabrese, that he was with Jeannot the night of the murder, and that Jeannot had admitted being the triggerman).

I'm willing to assume that this is a valid basis for admission.  Nevertheless, it appears to me to be a bad case of the tail wagging the dog.  The harm to the prosecution of not allowing this contextualizing evidence is nowhere near as weighty as the virtual certainty that the jury will take Jeannot's statement as proof that Orlando paid for the killing.  So I think sometimes the Confrontation Clause demands a balancing of how significant the valid evidentiary use is as compared to the probability that the jury will use the out-of-court testimonial statement, notwithstanding a limiting instruction, as proof of what it asserts.  Here, I think the majority drew the balance correctly.  It was virtually certain that the evidence would result in a Confrontation Clause violation, on the issue at the core of the case.  And the evidence, while helpful to the prosecution on the basis on which it was offered, was by no means essential.

I think this last point is especially so because, as the majority suggests, there were lesser alternatives.  For example, I believe a good solution would have been to allow the detective to testify that he had told Orlando that Jeannot had confessed to pulling the trigger but that the police had reason to believe that Orlando may have paid for the killing.  (There was some other evidence besides Jeannot's statement suggesting this that was presented to the jury, starting with the existence of the gambling debt and Orlando's friendship with Jeannot; there was also the lack of an apparent motive on the part of Jeannot.)  That, it seems to me, would have given the prosecution essentially all it needed, but without recital of the substance of an out-of-court accusation.

Two related points make the type of problem exemplified by this case both interesting and difficult.  First, I believe we are looking for second-best solutions.  That is, the ideal solution would be that the prosecution gets everything to which it is entitled and the accused's conforntation right is fully protected, but that is not always possible.  (In this case, I think we can get close.)  Second, I believe we are in an area of balancing – probability of a Confrontation Clause violation against loss of evidence used for a valid purpose – and that makes me very uneasy.  Sure, balancing is appropriate in many areas of the law, certainly including evidentiary matters, but when the Confrontation Clause is at stake hard-edged rules are more likely to provide protection, and that is one of the advantages of Crawford as compared to the old regime of Ohio v. Roberts. (I do believe there are other areas of Confrontation Clause doctrine that demand balancing.  For example, determining unavailability is often a matter of degree, and I believe so also is the question of the extent of mitigating action the state should be required to take before it can successfully contend that the accused forfeited the confrontation right by misconduct.)  It's too easy in cases of this sort, especially on habeas, just to say the prosecution had a good enough reason to justify admission, and so I give the majority credit, especially in the face of a careful and perceptive dissent, for declining to take that path.

First word from Justice Gorsuch on the Confrontation Clause

The Supreme Court today denied certiorari in Stuart v. Alabama, No. 17-1676.  I believe there is good news and bad news here. 

Stuart was charged with vehicular homicide, by drunk driving.  The State introduced a blood test through the testimony of a supervisor in the lab who had nothing to do with preparation of the report -- and who, in fact, was not even employed at the lab at the time of the report.  (See the decision of the Alabama Court of Appeals, taken from the appendix to the cert petition, at 8a, and the petition itself,  at 5-6, 10.)  Gee, that sounds an awful lot like Bullcoming v. New Mexico. This of course was a point emphasized by the petition, which frankly asked for summary reversal.  The Alabama appellate court did little more than wave at Bullcoming; it relieved on a prior decision that seems to have treated Bullcoming as inconsequential in light of an Alabama Supreme Court decision that spoke of what the U.S. Supreme Court "held, in a plurality opinion," in Williams v. Illinois.  (Note that even Oyez speaks of Justice Alito's opinion for four justices as the "opinion of the Court.")

The U.S. Supreme Court denied cert today, and as usual offered no explanation.  But Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Sotomayor, dissented from the denial.  And the dissent is very clear -- he rejects the reasoning of the plurality opinion in Williams, at least on the question of whether the lab report was offered for the truth of what it asserted, and also the basis underlying Justice Thomas's vote for the majority in that case.  And he cites Justice Kagan's dissent favorably.

So the biggest piece of good news is that Justice Gorsuch appears to be a tiger on the Confrontation Clause, and so it appears, from the first evidence, that the passing of Justice Scalia's seat to him will not do the doctrine any harm.  And another piece of good news is that Justice Sotomayor felt called upon to join the dissent; on this part of Confrontation Clause doctrine, at least, it appears that she is now in the right corner.

But it's unfortunate that no other justices thought the case warranted action.  I think petitioner's counsel was right that there should have been a summary reversal, and though those are rare they do happen.  But I suppose we shouldn't make too much of the Court declining to reverse summarily.  And what about the failure of others to join in Justice Gorsuch's dissent, and the decision of the Court not to take up the case?  I assume Justice Ginsburg and Kagan remain on the same side with Justices Gorsuch and Sotomayor.  That could have been four for certiorari.  If one but not the other was in favor of cert, she might have had various reasons for not wanting to join a dissent from a cert denial.  But I worry that neither voted for cert because they were afraid that Justice Thomas would stand in this case where he did in Williams and Justice Kavanaugh would take Justice Kennedy's place with Justices Roberts, Alito, and Breyer.

Ultimately, I choose to look at the glass half full.   Justice Gorsuch appears to be on the right side, and we didn't know that before. Perhaps Justice Kavanaugh is on the wrong side, but here's no way of knowing for sure -- and if he is, the Court would be just where it was before on these issues, no worse.

Continuing confusion on lab tests

Stu Dedopoulos, who does a wonderful job of keeping me informed, has brought to my attention the decision of the supreme court of his home state of New Hampshire, issued today, in State v. Watson.  It provides a good opportunity to comment on the sad state of affairs regarding forensic lab tests.

Watson was charged with felony sale of a controlled drug resulting in death, so toxicology tests on the victim were critical to the prosecution.  In all autopsy cases, the state's Chief Medical Examiner sends specimens to a private lab based in Pennsylvania.  In this case, the lab was asked to test for over 200 substances.  How many different tests the lab actually performed is not clear from the court's opinion.  In any event, the prosecution presented one witness from the lab, Dr. Daniel Isenschmid, a toxicologist, who supervised the lab's report but apparently observed none of the testing.  He testified to the presence in the victim's blood of fentanyl, norfentanyl ( metabolic breakdown of fentanyl), and a breakdown of marijuana, and to the presence of marijuana and opiates in the victim's urine.  He also testified to the amounts of fentanyl and norfentanyl (21 and 2.2 nanograms, respectively), and given those he offered the opinion that the victim had ingested a large amount of fentanyl and that he died shortly after doing so.  The state supreme court ultimately upheld that Isenschmid's testimony did not violate the Confrontation Clause violation because "he testified to his own, independent conclusions."

Several points.  First, if the state had properly proved that there were 21 nanograms of fentanyl in the victim's blood and 2.2 nanograms of norfentanyl, there would be no problem under the Confrontation Clause with Isenschmid -- or any other qualified witness -- using that information to testify to an opinion regarding the cause and manner of death.  But Isenschmid did not know the facts on which his opinion was based, and the only proof of those came through testimonial statements by persons who did not testify.

Second, and relatedly, we really should be clear that it is nonsense to say that Isenschmid's testimony did not violate the Confrontation Clause because he offered "independent" conclusions.  His conclusion as to the manner and cause of death was based critically on information provided to him, such as that there were 21 nanograms of fentanyl in the victim's blood.  If he had just testified to factual propositions like that, based on testimonial statements made by other persons who did not appear at trial, I think the Confrontation Clause violation would have been clear.  That in addition to reporting those facts he offered an opinion based on them does not diminish the problem.

Third, to be precise, the problem is not that Isenschmid did not perform any of the tests.  Rather, it's that his testimony relayed, and relied on, testimonial statements made by persons who did not testify subject to confrontation, and as to facts as to which Isenschmid could not testify.  If, for example, he had observed a test and had recorded its results, there would be no problem with his testifying at trial as to that.  (This is important in autopsy cases, where there may be an observing medical examiner.)

Fourth, given Isenschmid's testimony that 12 lab employees handled the samples, the court says that "[t]aken to its extreme," the defendant's implication is that all 12 would have had to be produced for Isenschmid to be able to testify.  I don't know what Watson argued, but this parade-of-witnesses horrible is a strawman.  (Mixed metaphor cheerfully acknowledged.)  It is not necessary to produce everyone who handled samples; it is only necessary to produce persons whose testimonial statements are being presented, explicitly or implicitly, to the trier of fact. 

Fifth, as a related matter, the prosecution does not have to present live witnesses testifying to a chain of custody with no breaks whatsoever.  The court accurately quotes Melendez-Diaz, 557 U.S. at 311 n.1, that “it is not the case . . . that anyone whose testimony may be relevant in establishing the chain of custody, authenticity of the sample, or accuracy of the testing device, must appear in person as part of the prosecution’s case.”  Melendez-Diaz further said that gaps in the chain normally go to the weight rather than admissibility of evidence, and added:  "It is up to the prosecution to decide what steps in the chain of custody are so crucial as to require evidence; but what testimony is introduced must (if the defendant objects) be introduced live."  I'd add that it could be that the break is so large that the court is obligated to conclude that there is insufficient proof that the sample tested is the material one, but that would be an unusual case.

Sixth, I don't think there's any problem with a witness like Isenschmid testifying, "This is what we ordinarily do. . . ." and letting the jury conclude from that testimony that the lab acted in that way in the particular case.  The problem comes when he testifies, "This is what we did here (because my colleague, understanding full well this was a forensic test, told me what she did) . . . ."

Seventh, the Confrontation Clause should shape lab organization, not the other way around.  In the US Army lab, according to the evidence in a case I handled a couple of years ago, one lab analyst handles the sample from intake all the way through to report, even for DNA tests.  Perhaps that is mildly less efficient, not taking into account the accused's confrontation rights.  That's not a good enough reason to decline to organize the lab in that way.  Note that in this case Watson was convicted of a felony that subjected him to a life term (I don't know what sentence the court actually imposed.)  If the lab that the state chooses to use chooses to have three different analysts perform one test each, and the testimonial report of each is critical to the prosecution, then all three should testify.  But that is a non-inevitable choice that the lab makes.

Ultimately, I think it is the supposed multi-witness problem that scares courts in this area.  I think defense lawyers have to make carefully thought-out arguments as to what evidence the prosecution might need in the particular case, and who must therefore testify.  And they should not take the organization of a particular lab as a given.

Autopsy reports -- still waiting for clarification

Last May, I posted a discussion concerning the treatment of autopsy reports under the Confrontation Clause.  The principal issue is when, or whether, such reports should be considered testimonial.  A secondary issue, which arises in other contexts, is whether, assuming a report is testimonial, the prosecution can present secondary evidence concerning the contents of the report on the ground that it supports the opinion of an expert testifying live at trial.

I think the answers should be clear:  An autopsy report should clearly be considered testimonial when it concludes that the probable cause of death is homicide or otherwise provides evidence that a reasonable person in the position of the person writing the report would realize would likely be used in prosecution.  And if a report is testimonial, the Confrontation Clause is not satisfied by having an in-court witness rely on the report  for her opinion, whether or not that opinion is characterized as "independent," if the report only supports the opinion on the premise that the report is truthful.

But unfortunately there remains a great deal of confusion on these issues in the lower courts.  Some get them right, and others do not.  The Supreme Court indicated some interest in the problem last fall when it asked for a brief in opposition to the petition for certiorari (in which Jeff Fisher participated) in Garlick v. New York, but in the end it denied the petition.  Here are the petition (together with the motion for leave to proceed in forma pauperis) and the reply brief in support of the petition.

Meanwhile, Cody Reaves, who has since graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, did an independent study under my supervision on the Confrontation Clause issues related to the use of autopsy reports.  I believe his memo is a very useful resource for anyone doing research in this area, so I am posting it here.  It is Cody's work, not mine, and the conclusions are his; I certainly agree with some of his opinions, but not necessarily with all.

Another look at the Craig-Crawford disjuncture?

Crawford did not purport to disturb Maryland v. Craig, 497 U.S. 836 (1990), which allowed a prosecutor in some circumstances to present the testimony of a child by electronic transmission from a place outside the physical presence of the accused.  But Craig was based on the flexible approach to the Confrontation Clause of Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56 (1980), which Crawford overturned.  It is not surprising that Justice Scalia, the author of Crawford, wrote a bitter dissent in Craig, a 5-4 case, and that Justice O'Connor, the author of Craig, was one of two members of the Court not to join the majority opinion in Crawford:  The two opinions reflect radically different views of the Confrontation Clause.  Up til now, the Supreme Court has declined to discuss what the standing of Craig is in light of Crawford.  It has certainly had opportunities.  For example, see here and here. Now Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit has written a concurrence in a decision, United States v. Cox, strongly suggesting that the Supreme Court ought to take the matter up.   We'll see what happens. The justices won't necessarily take up Judge Sutton's suggestion, but his is a voice to which they will likely pay attention.

Cox involves electronically transmitted testimony by a third-grader and a sixth-grader.  Other child witnesses evidently testified live at the trial.

Scotusblog piece on the effects of Melendez-Diaz

Scotusblog recently ran a piece by Andrew Hamm titled Looking back at predictions in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts.  Here is a link. 

I think it's fair to say that this article bears out the conclusion that, despite the dire predictions made by Justice Kennedy of how devastating Melendez-Diaz would be to the criminal justice system, the actual effect has been rather modest.  There was, at least in some states, an initial period of adjustment, as one would expect.  And it may be that defendants' hands in plea bargaining have been strengthened slightly -- but that's not inappropriate, because if defendants' rights have been ignored and are then restored, their bargaining hands should be strengthened.  The Scotusblog article reports the findings of a Ph.D. dissertation by Catherine Bonventre concluding that the effects of Melendez-Diaz have been "none to minimal.  It also uses a study that I supervised, previously reported on this blog, indicating that even in DNA cases adhering to the confrontation right does not result in a parade of lab witnesses.

The Scotusblog article also summarizes the argument made by Sean Driscoll that the case of Annie Dookhan, who was cross-examined 150 times without her years of lab fraud being discovered shows the futility of cross in this context.  I certainly don't think it's a panacea, and it may be that a determined liar like Dookhan will often not be exposed on cross.  But I think the principal value of cross, or the possibility of it, in this context is that the practice of lab techs is likely to be considerably more careful if they know they may have to answer questions under oath about what they have done.

An issue to be resolved: The treatment of autopsy reports

This blog has remained dormant for some time, it part because I have been distracted by other work and in part because there haven't been all that many developments that I have thought are worth reporting on.  But I will try to begin posting again more frequently.

There is one set of issues in particular that I think is headed for resolution by the Supreme Court, the treatment of autopsy reports in murder cases, and I expect to be writing several posts on it.  There are two basic issues, one specific to autopsy reports and the other common to other types of forensic reports.

First is the question of whether, or when, an autopsy report is testimonial.  Let's bear in mind how this issue comes up.  Almost always, it is the prosecution in a murder case that wants to use the report without producing as a live witness the medical examiner who made the report.  And the report provides some information -- often the cause of death, and sometimes the time as well -- that is helpful to the prosecution.  Almost always it is clear that, at least as of the time the examiner wrote the report, he or she believed that the death was probably a homicide.  And that means that the examiner must have known that he or she was creating evidence for use in a criminal case.  In such a case, I think it is clear that the report (and especially the statements of use to the prosecution) is testimonial in nature.  If it were not, that is akin to saying to the medical examiner, "Write up your report, and send it in to the police and the prosecutor.  You know, and everyone else knows, that you are doing so with the anticipation that it will be used as evidence or the prosecution in a homicide case, but there will be no need for you to take an oath, or appear in court or before the accused, or be subjected to cross-examination."  That goes against the very core of the confrontation right, and it utterly lacks historical foundation.

Some courts have seen it this way.  Others, though, have regarded autopsy reports as non-testimonial, principally on the basis of the proposition that autopsies are frequently performed for public health purposes having nothing to do with prosecution.  That proposition is true but immaterial.  The question should not be resolved by taking a survey of such a large body of reports -- the question in any given case is whether this report is testimonial.  And even if one did think that the question should be resolved by looking at a category of cases, "autopsies" is too broad -- a more appropriate category would be "forensic autopsies" or "medico-legal autopsies", both of which are well-known in the field.  Even assuming we are to look at the "primary purpose" of the statement (I don't think that should be the test, and perhaps the autopsy case will finally cause the Supreme Court to abandon it), and even assuming that there can be only one "primary purpose" of a statement (an unresolved matter), the primary purpose of a forensic autopsy report is to provide information for the criminal justice system leading to the conviction of the perpetrator of a homicide.

It also should not matter whether the autopsy report is directed at a targeted individual -- five justices rejected that idea in Williams v. Illinois, and for reasons I have explained before and won't bother with now, they were right in doing so.

Nor does it matter that autopsy reports are sometimes performed in cold cases, and prosecution may not follow for some years to come.  It is not a general principle of law that when time passes the prosecution can be excused from presenting its witnesses, absent proof that the accused forfeited the confrontation right, and there is no reason to create such a principle with respect to medical examiners.  And indeed, in this context (unlike that of a crucial eyewitness) the state can protect itself to a great degree by ensuring (as is standard practice in at least some jurisdictions) that at least two people competent to testify about what happened in the autopsy are present (and preferably one of them rather young!).  The state could also protect itself to a great degree by taking a continuous film of the autopsy, including the patient's face.

Finally, it does not mater whether the medical examiner is independent of the police or prosecutor. We do not have a system in which the confrontation right applies only to witnesses who have an affiliation with the criminal justice system.

Second is the question of whether one expert witness can offer an "independent" opinion based on factual assertions made by another expert in a testimonial statement.  This issue is not peculiar to autopsy reports; it arises with respect to many types of forensic lab reports, and was present in Williams.  Five justices properly answered the question in the negative, but because of the unusual result in that case -- the four prevailing because Justice Thomas joined them on other grounds -- the matter is still in contention.  I've addressed this matter before, especially in discussing Williams, and may come back to it later, but won't say more here.

There is a case pending before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Commonwealth v. Brown, that presents both issues (although with respect to the second it may be that only state-law issues are involved).  The Superior Court opinion, 139 A.3d 208 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2016), held that the autopsy report was testimonial and introduction of it was a Confrontation Clause violation -- but that the error was harmless because another examiner testified to her "independent" opinion (even though that opinion was based in part on facts asserted in the autopsy report).  So the court got one right and one wrong.  Both parties have appealed.  Here is Brown's initial brief; here is the state's initial brief; here is Brown's second brief (reply brief on his appeal, and appellee's brief with respect to the state's appeal).  The state will presumably file a reply brief on its appeal.

More to come on this set of issues.

Third petition on surrogate experts

Tim Provis, counsel for the petitioner in Roalson v. Wisconsin, No. 15-6037, which presents an issue similar to Griep and Katso, has kindly provided me with copies of the papers on cert.  Here are links to the Petition, the State's Brief in Opposition, and the Reply Brief supporting the Petition.

New cert petitions on the "expert witness end-run"

At least two cert petitions are currently before the Supreme Court on the question of whether, or when, a prosecution may present the substance of an out-of-court testimonial statement through an in-court witness who bases an opinion in part on that statement.  One is Griep v. Wisconsin.  The State originally declined to file a brief in opposition to the petition, but the Court requested one.  Here are links to the petition, to the brief  in opposition, and to the reply brief.  The second petition, on which I am counsel of record, is Katso v. United States.   The Government has twice asked for extensions of the time to file a brief in opposition; its time now expires on January 4.  You can read the petition by clicking here. 

Audio of public radio show on Ohio v. Clark

Joan Meier, who commented last week on this blog, and I appeared on Friday on a Los Angeles public radio show, discussing Ohio v. Clark. If you're interested, you can listen to it by clicking here.  
By the way, Joan cited favorably a recent book by Ross Cheit,  The Witch Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children.  Here for comparison is a very different view of the book.

I have insufficient knowledge of the subject matter to engage usefully in a debate over the Cheit book.  I will say, though, that I have great faith in the scholarly fairness and integrity of Sam Gross, my colleague of over a quarter century, and of Steve Ceci, with whom I have partnered on a few projects over the last fifteen years and more.

Ohio v. Clark: Some Initial Thoughts

A few thoughts on the decision in Ohio v. Clark:

1.  The result is totally unsurprising, and I was not even surprised by the unanimity as to the result; it was difficult at argument to perceive that any justice thought the statement was testimonial. 

2.  I don’t think the statement should have been considered testimonial: I don’t think three-year-olds have the capacity to make testimonial statements.  (Steve Ceci and I asserted this position in our amicus brief and in the law review article on which we based it.)  And I wish the Court had left it at that.  On p. 9, the Court does emphasize the age of the victim, saying that statements by very young children “will rarely, if ever, implicate the Confrontation Clause,” because of their cognitive limitations.  All correct, I think.  Future cases are going to have to work out what the boundary is as to when a child is old enough that his or her statements may fall within the Clause.

3.  Justice Scalia objects to Justice Alito’s treatment of Crawford as being just “a different approach” from Roberts, not emphasizing that it was a total repudiation.  But the fact is that the majority opinion deals entirely within the Crawford framework.  That’s good news.

4. At argument, several justices seemed to have doubts about the “primary purpose” test, but now eight of them double-down on it.  Too bad.  It really isn’t a coherent test, because so often purposes are joint and it’s really not possible to tell which is primary.  Consider Justice Alito’s statement, p. 11, that the teachers “undoubtedly would have acted with the same purpose [to protect the child and remove him from harm’s way] whether or not they had a state-law duty to report abuse.”  Well, you could flip that and say that they “undoubtedly would have acted with the same purpose [to aid in law enforcement] whether or not they had a protective purpose in mind” – if, for a gruesome example, the child seemed clearly on the verge of death.  And the “primary purpose” test is easily manipulable; we can anticipate that many statements will be funneled to professionals other than law enforcement and the state will cite some purpose other than law enforcement as primary.  I think there’s really only going to be clarity and a solid basis when the Court uses a test based upon reasonable anticipation, from the point of view of the speaker.  But we seem to be a long way away from that. 

5.  The Court indicates that the “primary purpose” test is a necessary but not always sufficient condition for a statement to be excluded by the Confrontation Clause.  P. 7.  This is, I suppose, dictum, as Justice Scalia says.  It’s potentially dangerous, though.  If it’s limited to the one kind of case Justice Alito mentions – “out-of-court statements that would have been admissible in a criminal case at the time of the founding”  – I suppose it’s not so bad.  What kinds of statements are those?  The only ones mentioned so far are dying declarations, which Crawford says are sui generis.  (I think dying declarations should be treated under forfeiture doctrine, but that’s another matter.)  But if the “not always sufficient” language becomes the excuse for the Court to say that even though the primary purpose of a statement was to create evidence for law enforcement, it still isn’t going to be treated a testimonial because, well the Court doesn’t want to treat it as testimonial, that could be a destructive wedge.  I’m hoping not.

I'll add in here a response to a question asked by Paul Vinegrad -- what do I think about Justice Scalia's comment on the defendant's "burden" to get the benefit of the Confrontation Claue's exclusionary rule.  I think that Justice Scalia sometimes has a tendency to read majority opinions with which he disagrees in what he considers the worst possible light -- which can have unfortunate results for him if his comments tends to be self-fulfilling prophecies.  I hope this is not such an instance.  He says, p. 3, that under the majority opinion future defendants and "confrontation Clause majorities" have a "burden" to provide “evidence that the adoption of the Confrontation Clause was understood to require the exclusion of evidence that was regularly admitted in criminal cases at the time of the founding."  But gee, I think all the majority said was that neither Crawford nor its progeny "has mounted evidence that the adoption of the Confrontation Clause was understood to require the exclusion of evidence that was regularly admitted in criminal cases at the time of the founding."  I think all that means is that if it is shown -- presumably by the prosecution or its backers -- that a given type of evidence was regularly admitted at the founding, then the Confrontation Clause presumably was not intended to admit it.  Nothing so dramatic there, and nothing that Justice Scalia should find particularly distasteful.  If evidence was regularly admitted at the founding, it's a pretty good indication that it was not considered testimonial in nature.  And the only type of statement that both (a) is testimonial and (b) was regularly admitted against criminal defendants at the time of the founding -- at least the only type discussed so far by the courts -- is dying declarations.  So I think Justice Scalia should have saved his powder there.

6.  The Court declines to adopt a categorical rule excluding statements not made to law enforcement officers from the reach of the Confrontation Clause.   That’s good.  It says that such statements are “much less likely to be testimonial than statements to law enforcement officers.”  I suppose that’s right.  (Statements to known law enforcement officers describing a crime are highly likely to be testimonial.)  But although the Court says such statements could “conceivably raise confrontation concerns,” I think some almost certainly do.  If we took a case very similar to Clark but made the victim an 13-year-old, as in a hypothetical posed by Justice Kagan at argument, p. 12 (I had mentioned a 18-year-old in a prior post), I think the case would have looked very different.

7.  Justice Alito says, p. 11, “It is irrelevant that the teachers’ questions and their duty to report the matter had the natural tendency to result in Clark’s prosecution.”  For support, he cites Davis and Bryant, in which statements were not testimonial though made to the police.  But “irrelevant” in the sentence I just quoted has got to be too strong; he might better have said “not completely dispositive”.
8.  Following that passage is this curious one:

Thus, Clark is also wrong to suggest that admitting L.P.’s statement would be fundamentally unfair given that Ohio law does not allow incompetent children to testify.  In any Confrontation Clause case, the individual who provided the out-of-court statement is not available as an in-court witness, but the testimony is admissible under an exception to the hearsay rules and is probative of the defendant’s guilt.  The fact that the witness is unavailable because of a different rule of evidence does not change our analysis.

I find this passage very difficult to understand.  (Jeffrey Bellin has also expressed uncertainty on EvidenceProfBlog about the meaning of this passage. What does Justice Alito mean by “any Confrontation Clause case”?  It does not seem that it could mean any case in which there is a violation of the confrontation right, for two reasons: 

(a) It is not true that in all such cases the maker of the statement is not available as an in-court witness.  There was no proof, for example, that those who made the key statements in Hammon v. Indiana, Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, or Bullcoming v. New Mexico were unavailable.  Indeed, availability of the maker of an out-of-court testimonial statement in itself means that the Confrontation Clause renders the statement inadmissible.   Could Justice Alito be using “not available as an in-court witness” to mean “not testifying in court”?  That would not only be a failure to use ordinary terminology properly, but it would not help make any point, given that in Clark the maker of the statement could not be made a witness.

(b) If there is a violation of the confrontation right, then it makes no sense to say “the testimony is admissible under an exception to the hearsay rules.”  (Does he mean “would have been admissible but for the Confrontation Clause”?  But then what does the passage prove?)  If there's a violation of the Confrontation Clause, it doesn't matter what the hearsay rules would otherwise say.

So does “any Confrontation Clause case” refer to a case in which the accused makes a seemingly plausible yet ultimately failed contention under the Clause?  Again, it’s not true that in all such cases the declarant is unavailable; the declarant may be available but ultimately the statement is determined to be non-testimonial

And what of the last sentence in this passage and its reference to "a different rule of evidence"?  I don't think Justice Alito means to suggest that in most cases the maker of the statement is unavailable by virtue of a rule of evidence; that's simply not so.  I suppose "different" is in distinction to the reference to a hearsay exception in the prior sentence.  So maybe the passage is intended to mean something like, "Often, when an accused makes a failed Confrontation Clause argument, the maker of the statement is unavailable and yet that does not stop the statement from coming in.  So it doesn't matter that here the cause of unavailability is a state rule."But there is a very significant difference between the situation in which the maker of the statement is unavailable by reason of circumstances beyond the state's control and that in which a rule created by the state renders the maker unavailable.

9.  The point that the state rendered the child incompetent to be a witness is particularly important because, given the result in Clark, states may have an incentive to declare  broader category of children as incompetent to be witnesses.  If statements made by those children are not testimonial, then the Confrontation Clause provides no constraint on use of their statements, and the state may be delighted not to call the child as a witness nor to allow the defendant to do so.

10.  Due process arguments are not resolved by the case, and I hope that defense lawyers now recognize that they are what is left to them.  Steve Ceci and I have argued that, given that the child is not capable of being a witness, if the statement is to be offered, the accused should have a right to have the child examined out of court by a qualified forensic interviewer.  I believe it is now particularly important that defense lawyers now claim this right.  (The "fundamentally unfair" language quoted above does not stand in the way; our argument is not that it is fundamentally unfair that the statement be admitted given that the child is not competent to be a witness.  Rather, we say that, if the statement is to be admitted, given that the child is not competent to be a witness, it is unfair not to allow the defense the chance to have an out-of-court examination of the child, the source of the evidence, through a qualified forensic interviewer.)

11.  It seems to me that Justice Thomas as actually loosened up a bit.  Instead of talking in terms of formality, he talks about indicia of solemnity.  That seems reasonable, if solemnity is understood to mean understanding the gravity of the consequences of the statement.  I would like to think that perhaps Justice Thomas has second thoughts about the extreme test of formality he applied in Williams v. Illinois.  Time will tell.

Clerk reversed

The Supreme Court decided Ohio v. Clark today.  You can see the opinions here.  The result is a 9-0 reversal in favor of the State.  No particular surprise there.  Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion.  Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Ginsburg, wrote separately, concurring only in the judgment, and Justice Thomas did the same.  The majority opinion indicates that statements to private persons or by young children will rarely be testimonial for Confrontation clause purposes, but it does not make a categorical holding on either point.  Justice Scalia objects to some of what he regards as anti-Crawford dicta in the majority opinion.  More later, probably this evening.

Civil Confrontation

The Confrontation Clause, of course, only applies in favor of a criminal defendant.  But it has long appeared to me that it reflects a broader principle in common-law adjudication, that ordinarily at least a party should have a chance to cross-examine those who testify against the party.  The Supreme Court has recognized that there is a constitutional basis, in due process, for such a right. But I was curious as to the circumstances in which this right has been asserted and what the response of courts has been.  I asked Nick Klenow, a former student of mine, to do some digging.   Nick, who graduated from Michigan Law earlier this month, has produced a Note, Due Process:  Protecting the Confrontation Right in Civil Cases, that I'm pleased to post here.  This memo is Nick's work, and the conclusions are his, not mine; I offered some guidance before he set out and a few very minor editorial suggestions.  I think the Note shows the wide range of circumstances in civil proceedings in which a confrontation right has been asserted, and often upheld, as a matter of due process.

As Nick's Note suggests, just what the bounds of the civil confrontation right are or should be is a difficult, perhaps intractable, issue; the answers seem highly context-dependent.  But I'll offer one comment to provide some theoretical perspective. Let's suppose there is a civil proceeding in which the state proposes to deprive an individual of some valuable right, privilege, or asset.  The state calls a witness and examines her, and at the conclusion of the direct the judge or other presiding official excuses her.  The individual whose rights are at stake protests, saying that he would like to ask some questions as well.  And the adjudicator responds, "No need.  I don't want to take the time.  That testimony was good enough."  It seems clear to me that this has to be, or at least can be in many circumstances, a violation of due process.  This, of course, is a strong case, but it demonstrates that the set of circumstances in which there is a violation of due process for failing to provide a confrontation opportunity in a civil case is not empty.  How much further the right applies -- for example, when instead of presenting a live witness the state instead presents an affidavit prepared for the sole purpose of creating evidence for the proceeding -- is the tricky question.

 

Remote testimony

Here's a belated report on a recent development in a long-standing issue.  Last month, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in New Mexico v. Schwartz, No. 14-317.  The petition presented the issue whether the confrontation right bars the presentation, over the accused's objection, of testimony taken, by two-way video, from a witness in a remote location.  But the case was not a good vehicle for presenting this issue, because the opinion of the New Mexico Court of Appeals turned on narrow questions of fact rather than on any broad question of principle.  It's an important issue, and sooner or later I hope the Supreme Court addresses it squarely.  I wrote on it years ago, pre-Crawford, in a piece titled Remote Testimony, 35 U. Mich. J. L. Ref. 695 (2002).  I'm going to want to think about the issue more; for now, I will offer a few thoughts and ask a question on which perhaps readers can shed some light.

The basic question is whether remote video testimony should ever be allowed over the accused's objection.  To take the strongest case, assume that the witness cannot feasibly be brought to or near the place of trial and that the accused cannot be brought to where the witness is; this may happen, for example, if the witness is in custody in a foreign jurisdiction.  Assume also that transmission is done as well as can be:  Crisp video, clear audio, no noticeable delays, the witness and accused each able to see each other, precautions taken to ensure that no one is able to give the witness signals or distract her.  So assuming all this, should the remote testimony be allowed though the accused objects on confrontation grounds?

The Confrontation Clause issue is not, or at least is not primarily, whether the ability of the trier of fact to assess the testimony is impaired by the fact that the witness is not in the courtroom.  It's a longstanding principle that, if the witness is unavailable at trial, testimony taken subject to confrontation at a prior proceeding may be introduced as a second-best substitute -- and of course until relatively recently the method by which the prior testimony was presented was almost always someone reading a transcript of it, which gives the trier of fact no benefit of demeanor evidence at all.

Rather, the question is whether confrontation between the witness on the one hand and the accused and his attorney on the other is undermined.  In 2002 (before Crawford), when the Supreme Court, by a 7-2 vote, declined to transmit to Congress an amendment to Fed. R. Crim. P. 26 that would have authorized remote testimony in some circumstances, Justice Scalia issued a statement that included the wonderful line, "Virtual confrontation might be sufficient to protect virtual constitutional rights; I doubt whether it is sufficient to protect real ones."  I don't think, though, that there is any principle that clearly makes it impossible to count confrontation through video transmission as the equivalent of in-court confrontation, any more than if witness and accused can see each other only through glasses.  I believe the issue should depend on empirical questions.  In my 2002 article, I asked two such questions:  

First, even with two-way transmission, would the distance and sense of insulation diminish the sense of confrontation--not an idly chosen term--that a prosecution witness faces when testifying against an accused? Second, would defense counsel be impaired to any significant degree in cross-examining such a witness by the sense of distance and by the delay in transmission that, even with up-to-date technology, is still noticeable?

I still think those are the questions, except that, unless I am mistaken, in most cases use of good technology will prevent any noticeable delay in transmission.  I think that before assuming that remote testimony is an adequate substitute for in-court confrontation, we should assure ourselves that the answers to both questions are negative.  As of the time I wrote the 2002 article, I was not able to find any studies that bore closely on these issues.  (I cited a few that bore rather distantly on them.) So that's my question:  Does anybody know of any research that helps answer these questions?

If the answers are indeed negative, then I think that remote testimony could be a great thing in some cases, making it far easier to provide confrontation than it otherwise be (and likely making courts more willing to require confrontation).  There would still be three important sets of issues to resolve, and for now I won't add more on these to what I said in my 2002 article:  (1) In what circumstances should the witness be deemed sufficiently unavailable to make remote testimony?  (I argued in the 2002 article that a rule on remote unavailability needs its own standard of unavailability, rather than incorporating the one in Fed. R. Evid. 804(a)). (2) In what circumstances should video confrontation not be deemed satisfactory, even though the witness is unavailable to testify at trial, because the accused  and counsel can be brought face-to-face with the witness.  (3) Assuming remote testimony is to be allowed in the given case, what quality standards must it satisfy?

Whatever the rule with respect to prosecution testimony, it seems to me that courts should be receptive, in appropriate cases, to remote testimony offered by the accused.  The confrontation right is not symmetrical, and it does not constrain the defense's offer of useful evidence.

An Op Ed: How courts should hear from children

Today's Washington Post is publishing an Op Ed piece by Steve Ceci and me, How courts should hear from children.  It summarizes the views that Steve and I presented in an amicus brief in Clark and in the law review essay on which the brief is based.

Justice Breyer's "30 exceptions" concern

A notable moment in the argument of Ohio v. Clark came when Justice Breyer acknowledged “misgivings” about confrontation doctrine and identified what he felt was the source:

I don’t want to see the Confrontation Clause swallow up the 30 exceptions to the hearsay rule, and therefore you have to draw lines. . . .

What’s at issue here to me, is the problem of not having th[e] Confrontation Clause swallow up the 30 exceptions which are necessary in many instances for the justice[] of a trial.

Argument transcript, at 49.

It seems to me this is a concern that Justice Breyer has expressed repeatedly, though perhaps not so clearly, at the argument of Confrontation Clause cases.  In this post, I’ll first elaborate on what I understand the concern to be, and then explain why I believe that the consequence that Justice Breyer hypothesizes, while certainly a valid matter to consider, does not in fact arise and need not constrain development of Confrontation Clause doctrine.

I think what Justice Breyer is responding to is basically this:  Over 200 years, a complex web of hearsay law has been worked out, reflecting judgments of what hearsay should be admissible and what not.  Then in 2004 along comes Crawford v. Washington, stating a big, blunt rule that, with very few qualifications (forfeiture, maybe dying declarations) excludes a significant category of hearsay when offered against an accused, unless the maker of the statement is unavailable and the accused has had an opportunity for confrontation.  So the concern, as I understand it, is that by following the theory of Crawford we will be denying the adjudicative system of important information it needs to achieve just results.

Now of course at one level we should not be concerned if the Confrontation Clause requires exclusion of evidence that escapes the rule against hearsay:  These are two separate bodies of doctrine, and just because a statement is not excluded by the rule against hearsay does not mean that the statement should be admissible; a given jurisdiction’s hearsay rule does not preempt all other exclusionary doctrines, especially a constitutional one such as the Confrontation Clause.

Nevertheless, I think Justice Breyer raises a legitimate concern.  The motivations underlying the confrontation right and the rule against hearsay are sufficiently similar that we might be very uncomfortable with a new theory of the confrontation right that rendered inadmissible wide swaths of prosecution evidence that for centuries have passed through hearsay screening.  (I know, the Confrontation Clause has nothing to do with reliability, and according to standard doctrine reliability is one of the principal factors determining whether statement is exempted from the rule against hearsay.  But I don't buy the standard doctrine.)   At least any large-scale exclusions of previously admissible evidence should make us take a reality check of the theory that causes the exclusions.  So, for example, I think that any theory of the Confrontation Clause that would generally render inadmissible statements made by a conspirator of the accused, during the course of and in furtherance of the conspiracy, would not have been viable.  (And in fact some passages in the Crawford argument suggest strongly that the Supreme Court would not have adopted the testimonial approach in that case had it thought that this would be the result; it was Justice Breyer who pointed out that a sound conception of what is testimonial avoids the problem, because such a statement is not made in reasonable anticipation of evidentiary use.  Argument transcript at 14;  for a copy of the transcript with questioners identified, click here.)

But in fact I do not think there is a real problem.  Conscientious adherence to the confrontation right requires exclusion of surprisingly little evidence that would not be excluded by prevailing hearsay law as expressed in the Federal Rules of Evidence, which has become the dominant modern template for ordinary evidence law in the United States.  Indeed, I think that there are only three basic areas in which this has occurred regularly since Crawford – and even in those it was only relatively recent doctrinal changes, or in some cases an essential abandonment of doctrine, that prevented hearsay law from excluding the statements:

First, before Crawford some courts had been admitting third-party confessions and statements made in formal, judicially supervised settings, such as grand jury testimony and allocution hearings.  Sometimes this was done under the hearsay exception for declarations against interest.  But extension of this exception to statements exposing the declarant to criminal liability and offered to inculpate the accused was a 20th-century development, greatly accelerated by the Federal Rules themselves.  And often application of the exception in that context appeared dubious, because it was not clear that the portion of the statement inculpating the accused was genuinely against the declarant’s interest.  And sometimes admission of these statements was allowed under the residual exception to the hearsay rule, which of course provided virtually no constraints at all.  As I understand it, post-Crawford admission of these statements, absent unavailability and an opportunity for cross, has essentially ceased, and I haven’t heard any complaints about that development.

Second, particularly in the decade or so before Crawford, many courts admitted relatively fresh statements describing a criminal incident.  As in Hammon v. Indiana, many of these got past the hearsay bar on generous interpretations of the exceptions for excited utterances or statements of present sense impression.  This was the phenomenon that Bridget McCormack and I described as dial-in testimony.  Since Crawford, this practice has been limited, but hardly eliminated.

Finally, there are forensic lab reports, as in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts; it was only under generous interpretations of, or modern additions to, the exceptions for public and regularly kept records that in the previous decades some jurisdictions (not all!) let these get these past the hearsay rule.

Those are significant areas, to be sure, but they hardly represent the destruction of the web of hearsay exemptions.  (I'll sometimes use the term "exemptions" here because, covering carve-outs from the definition of hearsay, it's more inclusive than "exceptions".)  Why has Crawford not created havoc with hearsay law?   The fundamental reason, as I argued last year in an essay titled The Mold that Shapes Hearsay Law, 66 Fla. L. Rev. 433, 449-58 (2014), is that, to a perhaps surprising degree, prevailing hearsay law, as expressed in the Federal Rules of Evidence, replicates the confrontation principle as expressed in Crawford.  What I call the confrontation principle is the general principle that one should not be allowed to testify against a party unless that party has had a chance to cross-examine, face to face, the witness who gave the statement.  And I’ll add that if one makes a statement aware of its likely use in litigation and it is admitted at trial against a party, then the maker of the statement is effectively a witness against that party.

So I’ll make three claims.   First, a descriptive claim: The rule against hearsay, as reflected in the Federal Rules, tends to conform to the confrontation principle.   That is, to a large extent, the hearsay rule tends to require exclusion of a statement if and only if  violates the confrontation principle.  That is why I call the confrontation principle the mold that shapes hearsay law.  Second, an historical claim:   The confrontation right developed before the hearsay rule, and the hearsay rule developed largely in conformity to the confrontation principle.  Over time, as the hearsay rule came to dominate the scene, it obscured the confrontation right, and the tie between the two diminished to some extent, but it is still strong.  And finally, a normative claim: To a very large extent, what is worth preserving of the rule against hearsay lies in the confrontation principle; we’d be better off throwing the rest of the rule against hearsay away.

I’ll begin with, and devote most of the remainder of this post to, the descriptive claim (though bits of history will creep in), because I think it’s most directly responsive to Justice Breyer’s concern.  I contend that if (a) a statement is made in anticipation of evidentiary use, (b) the statement is offered at trial for its truth, and (c) the declarant does not testify at trial, then the statement will probably be excluded by hearsay law unless either (c)(1) the declarant is unavailable and (2) the party-opponent has had an adequate opportunity for cross-examination, or (d) the opponent has forfeited the objection.  And in circumstances in which this principle does not require exclusion, hearsay law tends to be receptive to the evidence.

Note at the outset several structural limitations common to both the Confrontation Clause and hearsay law:

1. If a party makes or adopts a statement and it is then offered against him, there is no problem under either the Confrontation Clause or hearsay law. As has often been said, an accused has no right to confront himself.  Fed.  R. of Evid. 801(d)(2)(A) and (B) exempt from the hearsay rule statements made or adopted by the party-opponent.

2.  If the statement in question is not offered for the truth of a proposition that it asserts, then neither confrontation doctrine nor the rule against hearsay applies.  Crawford makes this explicit.  And so does Fed. R. Evid. 801(c)(2)

3.  If the declarant testifies at trial, that eliminates the confrontation problem (under prevailing doctrine) and it may eliminate the hearsay problem.  FRE 801(d)(1), 803(5).  Again, Crawford is explicit on this point.

4.  Neither the Confrontation Clause nor the rule against hearsay will block admission of a testimonial statement made out of court if the witness is unavailable to testify at trial and the party opponent has had an adequate opportunity for cross-examination.  Once again, Crawford is explicit on this point, which reflects long-standing practice, and which is established with respect to hearsay law by Fed. R. Evid. 804(b)(1).

5.  Both the confrontation right and an objection to the hearsay rule may be forfeited by at least some wrongful conduct that renders the declarant unavailable to testify at trial.  Fed. R. Evid. 804(b)(6) establishes forfeiture doctrine as part of hearsay law, and Crawford recognized the doctrine as part of the law governing the Confrontation Clause.   Fed. R. Evid. 804(b)(2) states a dying declaration exception to the rule against hearsay; I have argued many times that the best account for this exception is as an example of forfeiture.  But even putting aside that theory, Crawford suggests strongly that, on unique historical grounds, there may be an exception to the confrontation right for dying declarations.  Once again, this is not a type of evidence that passes hearsay scrutiny but then is excluded by the Confrontation Clause.

Note that these structural principles account for several of the important exemptions to the hearsay rule.  So now let's look at those that these principles haven't accounted for.   What we'll find is that in almost all circumstances the exemptions are crafted in such a way that, especially if conscientiously applied, they do not apply to statements made in anticipation of litigation use.  And we'll see that, when these exemptions have been applied to such statements, it is almost certainly a latter-day extension or peripheral application of the exemption.

Fed. R. Evid. 801(d)(2)(C), (D), and (E) address what are sometimes called vicarious admissions (respectively, statements by an agent authorized by the principal, statements by an agent on the subject matter of the agency, and conspirator statements).  Statements falling within these categories are almost by definition made in the course of going about one's business, without anticipation of litigation use; they are not testimonial.  Notice in particular conspirator statements, made during the course of and in furtherance of the conspiracy.  Such statements are clearly not made in anticipation that they will be used in prosecution.  This is the point made by Justice Breyer at the Crawford argument, as noted above.

Fed. R. Evid. 803 (1) - (4) is the family of spontaneous declarations -- present sense impressions, excited utterances, statements of current bodily, emotional, or mental condition, and statements made for purposes of medical diagnosis or treatment.  At the time of the framing, there were no such exceptions; all there was, well into the 19th century, was the res gestae doctrine, the idea that statements that themselves formed part of the story being told could be admitted on a non-hearsay basis.  As late as 1879, in R. v.Bedingfield, 14 Cox's Crim. Cas. 341, a statement made by a woman whose throat had just been slashed seconds before was held not admissible to prove the identity of the assailant.  (I think it probably should have been admissible on forfeiture grounds, but that's another matter.)  In the first decade of the 20th century, Wigmore wrote that for a generation a hearsay exception had been recognized for statements of this sort.  But the exception was still tightly confined to statements made very close to the time of the event.  In the late years of the 20th century, courts became far less restrained, being willing to characterize statements made long after the event as spontaneous.  Meanwhile, the exception for statements made for purpose of medical diagnosis and treatment grew out of the one for statements of current condition; the Federal Rules accelerated the development by making the exception apply to statements of past events related to the diagnosis or treatment.
 

Fed. R. Evid. 803(6) - (10) is the family of exceptions for public and routinely kept records (and the absence of them).  Most of these are made before the litigation arises.  Traditionally, as Melendez-Diaz pointed out, these exceptions did not apply to statements made with litigation in mind.  See, e.g., Palmer v. Hoffman, 318 U.S. 109 (1943).  And to a considerable extent the exceptions are crafted to make sure that they do not include such statements when offered against an accused.  See, e.g., Rule 803(8)(a)(ii) ("a matter observed while under a legal duty to report, but not including, in a criminal case, a matter observed by law-enforcement personnel"), (iii) ("a matter observed while under a legal duty to report, but not including, in a criminal case, a matter observed by law-enforcement personnel").  It was only very modern developments – occasional generous interpretations of these rules but more frequently special-purpose statutes – that allowed forensic lab reports to get past the hearsay rule in many jurisdictions.  Such statutes were invovled, for instance, in Melendez-Diaz and Briscoe v. Virginia,  130 S.Ct. 1316 (2010), the two recent Supreme Court cases involving formal admission of such reports without live testimony.  

Fed. R. Evid. 803(11) - (21),  (23), 804(b)(4)  –  Here is the great run of hearsay exceptions, perhaps what Justice Breyer had in mind more than anything else, covering records of religious organizations, family records, documents affecting interests in property, ancient documents, market reports, statements in learned treatises and the like, reputation, certain judgments, and statements of personal or family history.  Pretty much all of these will have been made before the present case arose pretty much all of the time, and they are almost certainly made without reference to the particular subject matter of the present case, especially if that case is a criminal one.  They are almost universally not testimonial for purposes of the Confrontation Clause.  So far as I am aware, none of these have ever raised an issue under Crawford. 

Fed. R. Evid. 803(22)  – This is an exception for certain judgments of previous convictions when offered to prove "any fact essential to the judgment".  Under a primary-purpose test, I don't think these are testimonial.  Under a reasonable-anticipation test, perhaps they are; one suffering the judgment of conviction might anticipate the later use of the judgment in another litigation.  But these judgments are used principally against the person who suffered the conviction, and usually, I think, in civil cases.  Even when used in a criminal case, this hearsay exception seems to amount to a lesser form of issue preclusion.  In any event, I am unaware of any cases since Crawford having raised an issue under this exception.

Fed. R. Evid. 804(b)(3) – This is the exception for declarations against interest.  In the case of Thomas Tong, 84 Eng. Rep. 1061 (1662), the judges of King's Bench agreed unanimously that a confession could be introduced against the person who made it but not against his former confederate.  This fundamental principle likely underlay the traditional resistance of courts, as there developed a hearsay exception for declarations against interest, to apply the exception to statements against penal interest.  The Federal Rules wiped out that limitation.  The Advisory Committee said the limitation was "indefensible in logic" but in saying so it pointed to Justice Holmes' well-known dissent in Donnelly v. United States, 228 U.S. 243 (1913), a case involving the confession of another person offered by the accused.   With respect to statements admitting guilt and inculpating the accused, the Committee did not advert to the sharp line established by Tong's Case but said that such a statement, if "made while in custody, may well be motivated by a desire to curry favor with the authorities and hence fail to qualify as against interest."  Nevertheless, in the years preceding Roberts, some courts admitted such statements.  And the Supreme Court consistently resisted these efforts.  It held in Lee v. Illinois, 476 U.S. 530 (1986), that the concept of declaration against interest "defines too large a class for meaningful Confrontation Clause analysis" and that, "when one person accuses another of a crime under circumstances in which the declarant stands to gain by inculpating another," there was presumptively a violation of the Clause.  It went further in Lilly v. Virginia, 527 U.S. 116 (1999), holding explicitly that "accomplices’ confessions that inculpate a criminal defendant are not within a firmly rooted exception to the hearsay rule as that concept has been defined in our Confrontation Clause jurisprudence." And, in a foreshadowing of Crawford, the Court noted that the statements at issue there "were obviously obtained for the purpose of creating evidence that would be useful at a future trial."  (Justice Breyer's concurrence was a broader foreshadowing of Crawford)  This still didn't put a complete stop to the practice, because some courts concluded that the particular third-party confession at stake was supported by individualized guarantees of trustworthiness.  That's what happened in the state courts in Crawford itself.

And finally, there is the residual exception, now in Fed. R. Evid. 807.  In restoring the residual exception, which the House had deleted, the Senate Judiciary Committee said, "It is intended that the residual hearsay exceptions will be used very rarely, an only in exceptional circumstances."  But over time, courts used it rather freely, applying it even to admit grand jury testimony against criminal defendants.  I'm not sure if anybody defends such uses now (absent evidence indicating forfeiture); they seem blatantly in disregard of any plausible theory of the confrontation right.   Indeed, the residual exception is so open-ended – it doesn't define a category of statements by circumstances, but only gives criteria guiding the decision – that I suspect it was not have been one that Justice Breyer had in mind when he expressed his "swallowing up" concern.

To sum this up, it appears clear that, for the most part, hearsay law (especially as applied to statements offered against an accused) conforms to the basic principles of confrontation doctrine. There are departures, of course, but they are almost all a result of latter-day extensions of or peripheral expansions of the hearsay exemptions.   And with respect to most of those departures, I don't think there's even all that much controversy over the proposition that the confrontation right should be understood to trump hearsay law's tolerance of the statement.  That is, I don't think too many people think that (absent forfeiture) grand jury testimony ought to be admissible against an accused, or confessions and other statements deemed to be against interest, made knowingly to the authorities, and describing criminal conduct (as in Lee, Lilly, and Crawford), or accusatory statements like Amy Hammon's made to the police in her living room while her husband was held at bay, a considerable time after the alleged incident.  There's considerable resistance, of course, to applying the confrontation right to forensic lab reports.  Notice, though, that not only was introduction of those reports a relatively new phenomenon, but because admissibility was usually achieved by a special-purpose statute rather than a hearsay exception as such, they do not illustrate the "swallowing up" concern.

If I'm right in my descriptive claim, that to a very considerable extent the rule against hearsay conforms to the confrontation principle, how did that come to be historically?  I think part of the explanation lies in the fact that the confrontation right developed long before the hearsay rule as we know it.  It's been a commonplace in the common-law tradition since the 16th century that witnesses testify live, face to face.  Sometimes this principle was enforced by using the word hearsay, but until the last years of the 18th century at the earliest there was nothing resembling the hearsay law as we know it – with a definition of hearsay expansive enough to reach any out-of-court statement introduced to prove the truth of a matter asserted in it, and even conduct offered to prove the truth of a belief apparently motivating the conduct, see, e..g., Wright v. Tatham, 7 E.R. 559, V Clark & Finnelly 670 (H.L. 1838), but modified by a long list of exceptions.  It is not surprising, then, that as the language of hearsay became dominant the newly developing rule incorporated the old principle.  Over time, I believe that because hearsay law was so broad, it occluded the confrontation principle lying at its core.  It was obvious that such a broad rule of exclusion at times impaired the search for truth, and so it must have exceptions, and because the hearsay rule was not conceptualized in terms of witnesses or testimony, and ran far beyond the scope of testimonial statements, the exceptions were not conceptualized in those terms, either, and sometimes they tended to chip away at the confrontation right. In a sense, to put a spin on Justice Breyer's concern, the right began, to some extent, to be swallowed up by the exceptions to the hearsay rule.

But that development only went so far, and my explanation lies in my normative claim:  What's really worth preserving in the hearsay rule, or at least most of it, lies in the confrontation principle.  I think that this can be demonstrated by a thought experiment.  Think of a situation – civil or criminal case – in which it seems really clear that hearsay ought not be admitted.  I'll be that the statement in that situation was testimonial – i.e., made in anticipation of use in litigation.  So I think that sense, that we really ought not let people testify against others without having to face them and answer questions, has continued to have a powerful hold on us, and has shaped hearsay law over the last couple of centuries even when it hasn't been well articulated.  And as a result we continue to have a high degree of conformity between the confrontation principle and hearsay law.

If I'm right about all that, then as a matter of policy we ought to think about transforming hearsay law so that, instead of an exclusionary rule punctuated by a Swiss-cheese-like array of exceptions, we articulate general principles constraining the use of testimonial statements.  (I think how those principles play out may be very different when the statement is not offered against an accused.)  I've written a law review article, soon to be published, outlining how this might work out; I'll provide a link here as soon as the editors let me.  I'm tempted to say that as a matter of policy, the confrontation principle should swallow up and replace hearsay law as we know it.

But that's another matter, for the crafters of state and federal evidence law.  For now, I think the key point is this:  Sure, conscientious adherence to the confrontation right calls for some results different from those that had come to be tolerated after many years of inattention to and misunderstanding of the right.  But for the most part this effect is limited to a few salient areas.  For the most part, the confrontation right does not swallow up hearsay law because for the most part hearsay law already conforms to the right. 

Solemnity

When the Supreme Court first mentioned solemnity as a criterion for determining whether a statement is testimonial, I thought that it was misplaced:  It’s not as if one has to be solemn to be a witness.   If that were so, the word would soon go out:  “Laugh and smile a lot when you make your video for the police.  Try to tell a joke or two.  Then you won’t have to come to court to testify.”

But now I realize that solemnity, properly interpreted, can express the essence of what makes a statement testimonial – that is, the act of witnessing.  And I believe Justice Scalia used it in this sense in the Clark argument, when he suggested that lack of solemnity was what made L.P.’s statement non-testimonial.  (Transcript, p. 4.)

I believe the proper way to think of solemnity in this context is not as a matter of tone or mood but as appreciation of the potential consequences of one’s statement and the gravity of those consequences.   Steve Ceci and I have argued, in our amicus brief and in the law review essay on which it was based, that for a person to be capable of being a witness he or she must  be capable of recognizing the truths in the following causal chain: 

As a result of my statement, my listeners may believe that what I say happen did in fact happen; as a result of that belief they may take action; and as an ultimate result of that action, the person whose conduct I am describing may suffer serious adverse consequences.  Accordingly, my listeners, or others, regard it as important that I speak truthfully.

Our emphasis in the brief and essay was on the capacity of the speaker.  But let’s move beyond that question – let’s assume an adult who is plainly capable of being a witness.  I think recognition of a similar chain of causation (by a posited reasonable person) is what determines whether the given statement is testimonial.  That is, if a reasonable person in the position of the speaker would realize that as an ultimate result of the statement the legal system may plausibly take action of significant consequence, and therefore the speaker is regarded as under an obligation to speak truthfully, the statement should be deemed testimonial.   The speaker is self-consciously creating evidence that may be used in adjudication; that is witnessing.    If the legal system allows a statement made under such circumstances to be admitted against an accused without the speaker confronting the accused, then we have created a system in which a prosecution witness can testify without confrontation.

I think solemnity viewed in this way can clear up a good deal of misunderstanding about what it takes to bring a statement within the Confrontation Clause.  Consider first the alleged limitation of the Clause to statements made to government agents.  At the Clark argument Justice Scalia said that it’s “clearly not true” that “no person who's not an agent of the government can trigger a Confrontation Clause protection”; “[i]t’s a question of solemnity,” he said, “but . . . solemnity has nothing to do with whether you’re a civilian . . . or a policeman.” (Transcript, pp. 4-5.)  Exactly right.  It may be true that most of the time in which someone makes a testimonial statement it is to a government agent, but in numerous circumstances one may say that a reasonable person in the position of the speaker would appreciate the solemnity of her statement, because of its potential litigation consequences, even though the immediate audience was only a private person (or no one at all).

Similarly, I think solemnity does the work that is sometimes mistakenly loaded onto the term “formal”.  In deciding Hammon v. Indiana, the Court said, “It was formal enough that Amy’s interrogation was conducted in a separate room, away from her husband (who tried to intervene), with the officer receiving her replies for use in his ‘investigat[ion].’”  In other words:  The potential consequences of the statement were clear, which gave it the solemnity of testimony.  There is no need for a separate inquiry into formality.