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Page Number: 16

Cite as:  602 U. S. ____ (2024) 

13 

Opinion of the Court 

Crawford made clear.  “Where testimonial statements are 
involved,”  that  Court  explained,  “the  Framers  [did  not 
mean] to leave the Sixth Amendment’s protection to the va-
garies of the rules of evidence.”  541 U. S., at 61.  JUSTICE 
THOMAS reiterated the point in Williams: “[C]oncepts cen-
tral to the application of the Confrontation Clause are ulti-
mately  matters  of  federal  constitutional  law  that  are  not 
dictated by state or federal evidentiary rules.”  567 U. S., at 
105 (opinion concurring in judgment).  We therefore do not 
“accept [a State’s] nonhearsay label at face value.”  Id., at 
106; see id., at 132 (KAGAN, J., dissenting).  Instead, we con-
duct  an  independent  analysis  of  whether  an  out-of-court 
statement  was  admitted  for  its  truth,  and  therefore  may 
have compromised a defendant’s right of confrontation. 

We did just that in Tennessee v. Street—and in so doing
showcased how an out-of-court statement can come into ev-
idence  for  a  non-truth-related  reason.    See  471  U. S.,  at 
410–417.  Street was charged with murder, based mostly on
a stationhouse confession.  At trial, he claimed that the con-
fession was coerced, and in a peculiar way: The sheriff, he 
said, had read aloud an accomplice’s confession and forced 
him  to  repeat  it.  On  rebuttal,  the  State  introduced  the 
other  confession  (through  the  sheriff ’s  testimony)  to
demonstrate  to  the  jury  all  the  ways  its  content  deviated 
from Street’s.  We upheld that use as “nonhearsay.”  Id., at 
413.  The  other  confession  came  in,  we  explained,  not  to 
prove “the truth of [the accomplice’s] assertions” about how 
the  murder  happened,  but  only  to  disprove  Street’s  claim
about how the sheriff elicited his own confession.  Ibid.  Or 

—————— 
long-established understanding, then it might shed light on the histori-
cal meaning of the Confrontation Clause.  But that could not possibly be
said  of  Rule  703—the  rule Arizona  cites  to  support  the  introduction of 
basis evidence.  On the contrary, that rule is a product of the late-20th 
century, and was understood from the start to depart from past practice.
See Brief for Richard D. Friedman as Amicus Curiae 17; Advisory Com-
mittee’s Notes on Fed. Rule Evid. 703, 28 U. S. C. App., p. 393.