Justices to Hear Case Testing Rule on Witness

Justices to Hear Case Testing Rule on Witness - New York Times

WASHINGTON - A defendant's right to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses is among the most valuable of constitutional rights in the courtroom, one to which the Supreme Court has paid increasing attention in the last few years. A landmark decision in 2004 held that unless the witness is available for cross-examination, the state cannot ordinarily introduce any incriminating statements the witness made before disappearing.

But what if the defendant stands accused of the witness's murder?

The justices agreed on Friday to hear a case presenting that wrinkle in the Sixth Amendment's "confrontation clause." It is an appeal brought by a California man convicted of shooting his former girlfriend to death several weeks after she complained to the police that he had threatened and beaten her. The trial court allowed the police officer who had responded to the girlfriend's complaint to testify about her description of the matter.

The defendant, Dwayne Giles, argued unsuccessfully to the California Supreme Court that those statements should have been kept out of court, because there was no proof that he had killed the victim, Brenda Avie, for the purpose of preventing her testimony.

In allowing the statements, the California court applied an old doctrine called "forfeiture by wrongdoing," which means that a person should not be permitted to profit from wrongful acts. To invoke the doctrine, it was not necessary to prove that the defendant's motive was to make the witness unavailable, the state court said.

The question of whether proof of motive is necessary has come up with surprising frequency in courts around the country in the years since the Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington. That decision greatly strengthened the Sixth Amendment right of defendants to confront the state's witnesses by excluding statements from absent witnesses that previously had been commonly accepted, under the looser rules governing hearsay evidence.

Some legal scholars regard the Crawford decision as one of the Supreme Court's most important criminal law rulings in recent years. The author of the 9-to-0 decision, Justice Antonin Scalia, based it on a literal reading of the language of the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees a defendant's right "to be confronted with the witnesses against him."