Constitutional Law

Justices Consider Case Over Presentation of Lab Evidence; Hear Argument Over Meaning Of Criminal Law Provisions

Among cases considered by the Supreme Court yesterday were ones centering on how lab evidence in criminal trials is presented to juries and how to classify a defendant’s failure to report for a prison term.

In Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, the high court weighed policy of presenting crime lab findings in paperwork to juries. A Massachusetts man convicted for trafficking cocaine challenged that policy. The man’s attorneys have argued that the policy of submitting lab findings in paperwork to juries violated the Constitution’s “confrontation clause,” which guarantees criminal defendants the right to confront witnesses against them. The New York Times reported that the “justices seemed to struggle to find the dividing line between the kinds of information that must be presented through live testimony and those that are routine, reliable or tangential enough to require only a written certification.” During argument, Justice Stephen G. Breyer cited a friend-of-the-court brief filed by National Innocence Network that was “filled with horror stories of how police labs or other labs have really been way off base and moreover really wrong.” Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, however, argued against presenting live testimony from laboratory analysts, saying it would result in “undue burden with very little benefit to the defendant.”

In Chambers v. U.S., the high court heard arguments in a case involving what constitutes a “violent crime” under the Armed Career Criminal Act as it relates to convicts who fail to report to prison. Law.com reported that the justices weighed “arguments concerning whether failure to report is an aggressive or passive act, and contemplated hypotheticals involving a defendant” skipping jail time to relax in an armchair recliner or spend time with family during the holiday season.

The justices also heard another criminal matter involving statutory interpretation in U.S. v. Hayes. The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times reported that argument in the case was “dense with debate over rules of grammar … aimed at figuring out what Congress meant when it passed a statute in 1996 that expanded the scope of a law that makes it a crime for those convicted of felonies to possess a firearm.”

For more about yesterday’s arguments, see Scotusblog here and here. 

Full post as published by ACS Blog on November 11, 2008 (boomark / email).