Saturday, August 21, 2010

What type of hearsay does Crawford exclude and in what type of cases?

That's a broad question relating to a very difficult and important US Supreme court case.





Essentially, in ';Crawford vs. Washington'; and the cases that have come out since (';Davis'; and ';Hammond';), the Court has said that a criminal defendant has a right to confront and cross-examine any witness against him/her in a criminal trial.





Previously, the rules of evidence allowed some hearsay evidence to come in at trial without the witness being there so long as it met certain exceptions (excited utterance, etc.) and prosecutors would often use these statements if a witness wasn't available for trial.





Generally, Crawford creates a problem in domestic violence cases when a victim (due to many psychological reasons) decides not to cooperate with the prosecution and/or change her story at the trial. If that is the case, the prosecutor may no longer simply put on the police report or the previous statement she made to the police as evidence and must often find other ways to prove their case.





Crawford does not apply to civil cases or to criminal proceedings that are not trials (such as grand jury or preliminary hearings). It also does not apply to ';non-testimonial statements';, such as statements made in an emergency phone call to 911.





That's a very short and incomplete answer, but a full answer would require pages and pages of analysis.

No comments:

Post a Comment