Posted on 06/27/2009 6:39:31 PM PDT by neverdem
Expressing a heavy dose of skepticism that crime lab reports are so reliable as to be beyond question, the Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for chemists and other scientists who prepare such reports to be summoned to the witness stand in criminal trials to defend their analyses. The 5-4 ruling in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts (07-591) resulted from some unusual alliances among the Justices, and continued the deep division within the Court over how to interpret the Constitution’s guarantee that an individual on trial for a crime has a right to face and challenge the witnesses for the prosecution.
Justice Antonin Scalia, the Confrontation Clause’s most devoted defender on the Court, wrote for the majority: “There is little reason to believe that confrontation will be useless in testing analysts’ honesty, proficiency, and methodology — the features that are commonly the focus in the cross-examination of experts.”
The ruling will provide for an added layer of challenge by defense lawyers to such criminal evidence as illegal drugs, fingerprints, blood spatter patterns and blood chemistry, guns and bullets, and other forms of physical evidence subjected to lab analyses, at least when the resulting reports are prepared for use as evidence in criminal trials.
Now, if prosecutors want to offer a crime lab report as evidence, and the report was prepared with the aim that it would be used at trial, the prosecution has to bring along the author or scientist and make them available for questioining by the defense — if the defense insists on the right to confront the analyst. It is not up to defense lawyers to summon them to the stand, but they must assert the right to confront the analyst, the Court indicated.
The opinion recited a good deal of information from published reports about how defective crime labs and their results are, and said that claims that lab reports are the product of “neutral scientific testing” are open to challenge because such reports are not “as neutral or as reliable” as advertised. “Forensic evidence,” Scalia wrote, “is not uniquely immune from the risk of manipulation.”
He cited one report, for example, that said “there is wide variabiility across forensic science disciplines with regard to techniques, methodologies, reliability, types and numbers of potential errors, research, general acceptability, and published material.”
Putting the chemist or lab technician on the stand to be tested by cross-examination, the majority said, will help “weed out not only the fraudulent analyst, but the incompetent one as well.”
Still, Scalia said, the decision to compel the reports’ expert authors to testify is based ultimately on the right of confrontation, not the quality of the reports or the credibility of the chemist. “We would reach the same conclusion,” he wrote in a footnote, “if all analysts possessed the scientific acumen of Mme. Curie and the veracity of Mother Theresa.”
To the complaints of prosecutors (and the dissenting Justices) that the decision is going to lay a heavy new burden on the preparation and analysis of criminal evidence, Justice Scalia opined that “the sky will not fall.”
The best evidence of that, he wrote, is that the sky had not fallen even without the new ruling, because “many states have already adopted the constitutional rule that we announce today, while many others permit the defendant to assert (or forfeit by silence) his Confrontation Right after receiving notice of the prosecution’s intent to use a forensic analyst’s report…There is no evidence that the criminal justice system has ground to a halt…”
Moreover, Scalia said, defense lawyers may often opt not to insist on confronting a crime lab analyst, because they may conclude for strategic reasons that this might highlight rather than cast doubt on the report’s results as evidence.
Scalia’s opinion was supported by three of the Court’s more liberal members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens — and by another conservative like Scalia: Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas filed a separate concurrence, putting some limits on what he understood the sweep of the ruling might be.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, joined by two conservatives, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and a member of the liberal bloc, Justice Stephen G. Breyer. Kennedy began his dissent with a sweeping challenge: “The Court sweeps away an acceped rule governing the admission of scientific evidence. Until today, scientific evidence could be introduced into evidencde without testimony from the ‘analyst’ who produced it. This rule has been established for at least 90 years.”
They're just wrong on different issues. What about Kelo? Roe? Casey? Lopez? Almost anything having to do with guns (though the "conservatives hardly get full credit for this one either)?
Invariably? No, of course not. But it’s a potential bias that the courts till now have been intent on hiding. Like when they won’t let you argue the Constitution at trial, only on appeal, or when the judge is allowed to lie to you and tell you you’re not allowed to nullify. Remember, the defense doesn’t HAVE to use this, it just gives them the option in those cases where they want to. And your point about billing by the hour is certainly well taken.
And I’m not saying they’re not honest, or at least the majority, but the jury might take their findings with a little less weight if they stop and think who they work for. Not just dismiss them entirely like a liberal would, just don’t take everything they at face value without thinking.
Indeed - very odd alliance of justices.
Not carelessness. At that point, nobody knew the stuff was dangerous. But she found out.
I think you may have hit on something. When someone gets arrested for violating an EPA regulation based on their false science you can now haul the “scientist” into court:)
Right? :)
And fortunately, it sides with the individual over the state.
That's what makes it unusual! (Sorta kidding) Good news on Safford, too, except my man CT is off the reservation. Not sure what his point is and have sufficient respect for him over the years to read what he has to say before criticizing. Not sure how anyone could side with Safford on this, though. (They strip searched a girl looking for Advil!!)
I agree, in my opinion Thomas is the best Justice in terms of original intent and protecting the individual over the state.
I agree, which makes it really hard to see why he would vote for the state in what seems like such a clear cut case. They strip searched her looking for Advil!! If I were on the court, not only would they lose this case, but for the first time in history, SCOTUS would be handing down directly from their bench long terms in a FPMITAP!
Up thread I was having a exchange with a poster who said that despite his knee jerk reaction, he found the conservative justices pro-govt, and the liberals pro-individual. I think liberals are just statist on different (and more) issues and gave some examples, but I do grant that the conservatives hardly vote like principled Constitutional scholars. But Thomas?? He's the one I generally hold above any criticism at all. I almost said in that exchange that what we need are eight more Thomases.
Most people are going to think strip searching is the nuclear option when it comes to the powers of a school district, to be employed under only the most extreme and unquestionable justification. They hear this and they'll probably think something like "Well, strip searching is pretty severe even for drugs, but maybe her family are known drug dealers or something". The newscast gave no hint that they were stripping her naked to verify an uncorroborated tip that she was doing something that WASN'T EVEN ILLEGAL! Talk about sham reporting.
Sorry. I meant my post 31 to be addressed to you.
Oh, and Grisham, while his fiction is excellent (I think I’ve read all of it, as well as An Innocent Man), is a hard core liberal. Look at his characters, and what they’re doing that’s bad. I mean, it usually is BAD, what they’re doing, but the bad guys almost always people and actions that fit the liberal stereotypes of conservatives. Too much socialism never seems to be the problem, always the private sector or moneyed conservatives meddling in politics.
Yep, that’s the problem with lefty types and liberals being the writing class and the guys who do screenplays. Notice how you seldom see an intelligent Christian in a movie. Started back in the 50s and 60s. Remember all those westerns where southerners were a bunch of wahoo idiots and christians were always the intolerant type who beat their wives and kids and wanted to lynch innocent minorities, innocent people, and were really hypocrites who had actually robbed the bank.
parsy, who grew up in south Georgia and and could probably go wahoo if necessary.
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