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Admissibility As Cause And Effect: Considering Affirmative Rights Under The Confrontation Clause, John G. Douglass
Admissibility As Cause And Effect: Considering Affirmative Rights Under The Confrontation Clause, John G. Douglass
Law Faculty Publications
In this essay, I first examine some of the strategic choices spawned by the Supreme Court's "microscopic" focus on reliability in confrontation-hearsay cases. Rather than promoting the value at the core of the Confrontation Clause-the adversarial testing of prosecution evidence-the Court's approach leads to choices that ignore that value. While the Court scrutinizes hearsay under the microscope of reliability, it leaves the parties free to ignore and even to avoid available opportunities for effective confrontation of the hearsay declarant. At the same time, the Court's constitutional definition of reliability-which it equates with "firmly rooted" hearsay exceptions -has encouraged prosecutors to …
Confronting The Reluctant Accomplice, John G. Douglass
Confronting The Reluctant Accomplice, John G. Douglass
Law Faculty Publications
The Supreme Court treats the Confrontation Clause as a rule of evidence that excludes unreliable hearsay. But where the hearsay declarant is an accomplice who refuses to testify at defendant's trial, the Court's approach leads prosecutors and defendants to ignore real opportunities for confrontation, while they debate the reliability of hearsay. And even where the Court's doctrine excludes hearsay, it leads prosecutors to purchase the accomplice's testimony through a process that raises equally serious questions of reliability. Thus, the Court's approach promotes neither reliability nor confrontation. This Article advocates an approach that applies the Confrontation Clause to hearsay declarants in …
Beyond Admissibility: Real Confrontation, Virtual Cross-Examination And The Right To Confront Hearsay, John G. Douglass
Beyond Admissibility: Real Confrontation, Virtual Cross-Examination And The Right To Confront Hearsay, John G. Douglass
Law Faculty Publications
Part I of this Article describes how the Court turned the Confrontation Clause into a rule excluding unreliable hearsay, culminating in the 1980 decision in Ohio v. Roberts, in which the Court set out the "general approach" that dominates confrontation-hearsay analysis today. Part II assesses the application of the Court's exclusionary rule in the two decades since Roberts, a period during which the Confrontation Clause largely has merged with, and disappeared into, the law of evidence, in the process losing its significance as an independent protection for the accused in an adversarial system. Part III argues that the Court's choice …