The Rap Sheet: Nolo's Criminal Law Blog

Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 25, 2009, is the latest salvo in the Sixth Amendment Wars.  Since 2004, one of the most divisive issues the Court has faced has concerned the meaning of the 6th Amendment's "Confrontation Clause."  So far, the Scalia-led majority insisted that the prosecution produce live witnesses instead of hearsay, and Scalia carried the day again in Melendez-Diaz.

The case involved the admissibility of certificates prepared by government lab technicians and stating under oath that the powder that police officers had seized was cocaine.  The prosecutor offered the certificates into evidence in lieu of calling the lab technician who had performed the test, and the Court ruled that doing so violated the 6th Amendment and invalidated the conviction.

The decision has the potential to make drug prosecutions too costly to pursue.  Many testing labs are already hard-pressed to keep up with the demands for test results.  If the technicians who carry out the testing also have to sit around courthouses waiting to testify, the backlogs will grow longer. The costs of the decision may be prohibitively high in rural states, where only one or two labs run tests for the entire state.  And when substances are sent to the FBI in Washington, D.C. for testing, Melendez-Diaz requires technicians to travel all over the country to testify regarding test results that they probably can't recall -- other than by looking at their certificate, anyway. 

A spokesperson for a national DIstrict Attorneys organization calls the decision a "train wreck" for prosecutors, and he may be right.  However, Justice Scalia has the mind-set of a junkyard dog when it comes to the protection of his 2004 Crawford decision.  To paraphrase an old homily, Scalia seems to believe that it is better that 99 defendants go free than one bit of hearsay escapes the 6th Amendment.              

In the 2004 "Crawford case", the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause to require prosecutors to present live witnesses rather than hearsay whenever the hearsay was "testimonial." The decision has given rise to lots of commentary and court opinions (many of them conflicting) about whether particular types of hearsay are testimonial.  For example, if a domestic violence victim makes an emergency call to a 911 operator, the victim's statements are likely not to be testimonial, meaning that prosecutors can, if necessary, offer a transcript of the call into evidence if the victim refuses to come to court and testify.  On the other hand, if the domestic violence victim talks to a police officer once the emergency is over, the victim's statements are testimonial. If the victim refuses to testify, the prosecutor cannot call the police officer as a witness to testify to what the victim said.

One of the elephants in the Confrontation Clause room is whether lab reports are testimonial.  Every day, hundreds of doctors and other technicians conduct autopsies, test substances to determine whether they are illegal drugs, determine the alcohol context of blood or urine, etc.  They prepare reports of their findings and before Crawford most courts routinely admitted these reports into evidence at trial under long-established hearsay exceptions for business or official records. But if these reports are testimonial, defendants would have the right to insist that the report preparers testify in person.  The ramifications of such a result are potentially huge. If forensic experts have to testify, at the very least trials become longer and lab backlogs will continue to grow because experts who are testifying (or, more likely, waiting to testify) are not conducting tests.

Sometime in early 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court will likely issue an opinion addressing these issues.  The case is Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, and the Court heard arguments in the case in November 2008.  Forensic lab reports certainly look testimonial in that they are prepared by government officials who usually are aware that they may be offered into evidence at trial.  Prosecutors counter that lab reports are not testimonial because they are objective, especially since many of them are simply machine-generated.  Prosecutors also argue that if defendants really want report preparers to testify, the defendants can call them as their own witnesses.

The outcome of Melendez-Diaz is likely to have a huge impact on the day-to-day functioning of the criminal courts.  My prediction: Since the Supremes have been Confrontation Clause-happy, they will rule that most lab reports are testimonial.