SAN DIEGO CRIMINAL DEFENSE: TESTIMONIAL HEARSAY, THE CONFRONTATION CLAUSE, AND CASUAL REMARKS
The California Supreme Court rules that admission of a statement made by a 3-year old, two months after the crime, failed to qualify as spontaneous, finding harmless error.
But they reject the claim that this violated the Sixth Amendment's confrontation clause. They take some language from Crawford (541 U.S. 36) that testimonial hearsay, admission of which violates the Sixth Amendment, doesn't include a casual remark made to an acquaintance. They say that the US Supremes haven't defined what testimonial means.
I assume that this was written before Davis (547 US 813), where the U.S. Supremes explained that testimonial means description of a previous event, as opposed to an
ongoing emergency. Under Davis, this statement is clearly testimonial.
Facetious remark (because I'm posting this on Saturday, and I stole it from Al Menaster)
Hey, let's pretend the later case never happened, so we can take some language from an earlier case to affirm a death sentence.
People v. Gutierrez; 2009 DJ DAR 2353; DJ, 2/20/09; Cal. Supremes
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