Sixth Amendment Confrontation
In 2006, a stray 9-millimeter bullet killed a two-year old child in the Bronx. New York charged Nicholas Morris with the murder, but later offered him a plea deal for a lesser charge that involved a .357-magnum, not the 9-millimeter handgun originally charged in the indictment.
Years later, New York charged Darrell Hemphill for the same murder. Hemphill blamed Morris at trial, and elicited undisputed testimony from a prosecution witness that police had recovered 9-millimeter ammunition from Morris’s nightstand. Morris wasn’t available to testify, but the trial court allowed the State to introduce parts of his plea allocation as evidence to rebut Hemphill’s theory that Morris committed the murder. The court thought Hemphill’s arguments had “opened the door” to the introduction of these testimonial out-of-court statements.
The question was whether the admission of the plea allocation violated Hemphill’s Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses against him. The Supreme Court held it did.
The State’s primary contention was that the Reid rule, a New York State rule, “is not an exception to the Confrontation Clause at all.” It argued Reid was a mere “procedural rule” that “treats the misleading door-opening actions of counsel as the equivalent of failing to object to the confrontation violation.”
The Court said the door-opening principle incorporated in Reid is not a procedural rule, but a substantive principle of evidence that dictates what material is relevant and admissible in a case. It explained the principle requires a trial court to determine whether one party’s evidence and arguments, in the context of the full record, have created a “misleading impression” that requires correction with additional material from the other side. Allowance of Reid would negate Crawford’s emphatic rejection of the reliability-based approach of Ohio v. Roberts. “If Crawford stands for anything, it is that the history, text, and purpose of the Confrontation Clause bar judges from substituting their own determinations of reliability for the method the Constitution guarantees.” The upshot of the role of the trial judge is not, for Confrontation Clause purposes, to weigh the reliability or credibility of testimonial hearsay evidence; it is to ensure that the Constitution’s procedures for testing the reliability of that evidence are followed. The trial court violated this principle by admitting unconfronted, testimonial hearsay against Hemphill simply because the trial judge believed his presentation to have created a misleading impression that the testimonial hearsay was reasonably necessary to correct.
The Confrontation Clause requires that the reliability and veracity of the evidence against a criminal defendant be tested by cross examination, not determined by a trial court.