Talk Radio News Service: News, Politics, Media

By Matthew S. Schwartz — Talk Radio News Service

The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives criminal defendants the right to confront witnesses against them, and that includes the technicians who analyze the evidence found at the scene, the Supreme Court ruled today in a 5-4 decision that crossed the court's ideological lines.

Until today, the Confrontation Clause only guaranteed defendants the right to face witnesses who were explicitly testifying against them; scientists and technicians who merely ran tests and prepared sworn "certificates of analysis" did not need to come to court and face the defendant in person. With today's ruling, they do.

The word "witnesses" in the Sixth Amendment means anyone who presents testimony against the defendant, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his bench statement discussing his majority opinion, which was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Certificates of Analysis are testimonial statements against the defendant, and so the analysts must be called for cross-examination, the Court ruled.

"Confrontation is designed to weed out not only the fraudulent analyst, but the incompetent one as well," Scalia wrote. "Serious deficiencies have been found in the forensic evidence used in criminal trials."

The four dissenting justices were, put bluntly, aghast at the decision today, arguing that the majority had, in one fell swoop, disregarded the accepted Confrontation Clause rules that have been in place for at least 90 years, and extend across 35 states and six federal Courts of Appeals.

"It is remarkable that the Court so confidently disregards a century of jurisprudence," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the dissent, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., Justice Stephen Breyer and Justice Samuel Alito. "We learn now that we have misinterpreted the Confrontation Clause — hardly an arcane or seldom-used provision of the Constitution — for the first 218 years of its existence."

Particularly problematic, the dissenters argue, is the fact that the Court required the "analyst" to testify, but made no attempt to explain which analyst they were referring to. In the context of a standard drug test that leads to a Certificate of Analysis, there could be four different technicians that each count as the "analyst."

The ruling "has vast potential to disrupt criminal procedures that already give ample protections against the misuse of scientific evidence," Kennedy wrote, calling the Court's new reading of the Confrontation Clause "formalistic and pointless."

The case was Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts.