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HEMPHILL v. NEW YORK 

Syllabus 

revolver, not murder, was the crime Morris committed.  The jury found 
Hemphill guilty.  Both the New York Appellate Division and the Court 
of Appeals affirmed Hemphill’s conviction. 

Held: The trial court’s admission of the transcript of Morris’ plea allocu-
tion over Hemphill’s objection violated Hemphill’s Sixth Amendment
right to confront the witnesses against him.  Pp. 6–15.

(a) The State’s threshold argument—that Hemphill’s failure to pre-
sent his claim adequately to the state courts should prevent the Court 
from deciding his federal-law challenge to the state-court decision—is 
rejected.  Hemphill  satisfied  the  presentation  requirement  in  state 
court.  See Street v. New York, 394 U. S. 576, 584.  At every level of his
proceedings in state court, Hemphill argued that the admission of Mor-
ris’ plea allocution violated his Sixth Amendment right to confronta-
tion  as  interpreted  by  this  Court.   And  “[o]nce  a  federal  claim  is 
properly presented, a party can make any argument in support of that
claim.”  Yee v. Escondido, 503 U. S. 519, 534.  Pp. 6–8.

(b)  The  Confrontation  Clause  of  the  Sixth  Amendment  provides  a 
criminal defendant the bedrock right “to be confronted with the wit-
nesses  against  him.”    In  Crawford  v.  Washington,  541  U.  S.  36,  the 
Court examined the history of the confrontation right at common law 
and  concluded  that  “the  principal  evil  at  which  the  Confrontation 
Clause  was  directed  was  the  civil-law  mode  of  criminal  procedure,” 
which allowed the “use of ex parte examinations as evidence against 
the accused.”  Id., at 50.  The Crawford Court reasoned that because 
“the  Sixth  Amendment  does  not  suggest  any  open-ended  exceptions 
from the confrontation requirement to be developed by the courts,” the 
confrontation  guarantee  was  “most  naturally  read”  to  admit  “only
those exceptions established at the time of the founding.”  Id., at 54; 
see also Giles v. California, 554 U. S. 353, 377.  Because “the Framers 
would not have allowed admission of testimonial statements of a wit-
ness who did not appear at trial unless he was unavailable to testify, 
and the defendant had had a prior opportunity for cross-examination,” 
the  Court  rejected  its  previous  “reliability  approach”  to  the  Sixth 
Amendment’s  confrontation  right  described  in  Ohio  v.  Roberts,  448 
U. S. 56, 66, which had permitted the admission of statements of an
unavailable witness so long as those statements had “adequate indicia 
of reliability.”  Pp. 8–9.

(c)  The  Court  rejects  the  State’s  contention  that  the  “opening  the 
door” rule incorporated in People v. Reid and applied here is not a Con-
frontation Clause exception at all but merely a “procedural rule” lim-
iting only the manner of asserting the confrontation right, not its sub-
stantive  scope.    While  the  Court’s  precedents  do  recognize  that  the 
Sixth  Amendment  leaves  States  with  flexibility  to  adopt  reasonable