Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/reading-michigan-v-bryant-reading-justice-sotomayor
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 04:01:17+00:00

Document:
What are we to make of Justice Sotomayor’s criminal procedure jurisprudence? In this Essay, Professor I. Bennett Capers attempts to answer that question by offering three readings of her Confrontation Clause decision in Michigan v. Bryant. All three close readings, coupled with details from her memoir, serve as the basis for a “reading” of Justice Sotomayor. In toto, these readings reveal Justice Sotomayor to be precedent-bound, except when she’s not, and to be progressive, but not above using conservative methodologies to get her way. Ultimately, Professor Capers suggests that her approach offers some heartening signals and some possible dangers, but also reasons to hope.
Almost daily, people ask me what I hope my legacy will be, as if the story were winding down, when really it has just begun. . . . My highest aspiration for my work on the Court is to grow in understanding beyond what I can foresee, beyond any borders visible from this vantage.
But what of her jurisprudence, and specifically her criminal procedure jurisprudence? This Essay attempts to answer that question by focusing on one of her more well-known decisions, Michigan v. Bryant,4 and to a lesser extent on her memoir. The argument I want to make is straightforward: That Justice Sotomayor is precedent-bound, except when she’s not. That she’s progressive, but not above using conservative methodologies to get her way. And while there’s much to applaud in her jurisprudence, there are dangers too. And hope.
This Essay proceeds as follows. Part I provides background to Justice Sotomayor’s decision in Bryant by describing the recent Confrontation Clause cases that preceded it. Part II then offers a “straight” reading of Bryant. Part III, the heart of this Essay, delves deeper to offer two additional readings of Bryant, one that reads “left” (focusing on the decision’s progressive agenda) and another that reads “right” (focusing on the decision’s conservative methodology). All three close readings, coupled with excerpts from her memoir, serve as the basis for my “reading” Justice Sotomayor. Some years ago, I described a Critical Race Theory practice of “reading back, reading black.”5 Here, my use of the term “reading” is again grounded in Critical Race Theory, but this time with a touch of black gay culture as well.6 So again, I end by “reading” Justice Sotomayor. In doing so, I note potential dangers. I note too my hope and expectations for Justice Sotomayor’s jurisprudence going forward.
Applying this test, the Court held that the 911 statements at issue in Davis reflected an ongoing emergency, and as such were nontestimonial.23 In contrast, the Court concluded that Hammon presented “no emergency in progress”;24 because the wife’s statements “were neither a cry for help nor the provision of information enabling officers immediately to end a threatening situation,”25 they were testimonial.26 The Court accordingly affirmed Davis’s conviction, and reversed Hammon’s.
All of this was before Justice Sotomayor was sworn onto the Court in August 2009, and presented with her own opportunity to weigh in on the Confrontation Clause in Michigan v. Bryant.
In March 2010, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Michigan v. Bryant, a case involving the admission of out-of-court statements made to the police and accusing Bryant of murder.27 For many observers, it seemed likely that the Court would find a Confrontation Clause violation, given the test articulated in Crawford and expounded upon in Davis and Hammon. Instead, the Court reached the opposite conclusion. The opinion, which received considerable media attention,28 was authored by Justice Sotomayor.
Although there was strong circumstantial evidence pointing to Bryant’s guilt—a police search of Bryant’s back porch revealed a bullet hole in the back door, a bullet on the porch, blood stains, and Covington’s wallet nearby34—the most damning evidence was from the officers who repeated Covington’s accusations.35 And it was the admission of this testimony that Bryant challenged on appeal as a violation of his confrontation rights.
There is nothing wrong with this conventional reading of Michigan v. Bryant. That said, it is rather conventional. And delving deeper reveals much more.
The third reading responds to the second and says, “Not so fast.” This third reading argues that, while Michigan v. Bryant is progressive in terms of its substance, it relies heavily, if unintentionally, on conservative rhetoric, and in doing so potentially opens the door to arguments that many, including Justice Sotomayor, might find troubling. Its rhetoric is of a piece with the “culture of fear” that Jonathan Simon has written so eloquently about,44 adds currency to the problematic notion of the home as a private space shielded from criminal intervention, and provides weight to arguments that favor preventive detention and mass incarceration. Read this way, Michigan v. Bryant is not left at all—far from it.
Read “left,” Bryant pays lip service to Crawford while in fact laying the groundwork for Crawford’s demise and for the reinstatement of the reliability test of Ohio v. Roberts. It is on par with a recurring theme in Critical Race Theory: that of dismantling the master’s house using the master’s tools.45 To be clear, one does not have dig very deep for support of this. The pro-Ohio v. Roberts references are explicit, and Justice Scalia spends much of his dissent attacking the majority for their apparently unsubtle attempt to revive Roberts.
Justice Sotomayor is certainly practical, and I do not think it a stretch to suggest that Crawford’s impact on prosecutors would have particular resonance for her. Simply put, Justice Sotomayor was likely acutely aware that Crawford made cases like the one prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney (ADA) Sotomayor very difficult, if not impossible.48 To be clear, Michigan v. Bryant was not a domestic violence case. But it did present Justice Sotomayor with an opportunity to walk back some of the language in Crawford and Davis. Allow me another play on black gay vernacular here: Bryant presented Justice Sotomayor with an opportunity to bring some criminal procedure “realness” to the discussion.
Implicit in Davis is the idea that because the prospect of fabrication in statements given for the primary purpose of resolving that emergency is presumably significantly diminished, the Confrontation Clause does not require such examinations to be subject to the crucible of cross-examination.
All of this is relatively straightforward, uncontroversial, and consistent with the view that places Justice Sotomayor, the former prosecutor, in the pragmatist camp.58 What is less obvious, I think, is how Bryant operates not only to undermine Crawford’s broad reach, but also to undermine Hammon, the one domestic violence case in which the post-Crawford Supreme Court found a victim’s statements to the police to be testimonial, and thus concluded that their admission at trial, through the testimony of the responding officers, was a violation of the defendant’s Confrontation Clause rights.
Recall that in Hammon, police responding to a radio dispatch found Amy Hammon alone on her front porch. She told the police that her husband Hershel Hammon had broken furniture and shoved her on the floor into broken glass and hit her in the chest and threw her down again. He had attacked her daughter. Things were sufficiently fraught that the police restrained Hershel from intervening and kept him separate from Amy. With Hershel still visibly “angry,” Amy repeated her statements in a battery affidavit at the scene.
My point here is not that Justice Sotomayor was unaware that the contexts in Bryant and Hammon were more similar than she was letting on. In fact, I suspect she was well aware.66 After all, from her years as an ADA, she had personal experience with domestic violence offenders posing a threat not just to their spouses, but to complete strangers. Recall that ADA Sotomayor’s second trial was a domestic violence case. Her memoir discloses another detail relevant here: the domestic abuser also assaulted a Good Samaritan who tried to intervene.67 As such, Justice Sotomayor was likely aware that there can be ongoing threats in both domestic violence and homicide cases.
Because some will interpret this as a bold claim, let me say it again. I think what Justice Sotomayor has done in Bryant is quietly subversive: on the surface, she claims that the statements at issue in Bryant are nontestimonial because they were made in a context different from that in Hammon; but beneath the surface, her real message seems to be that the contexts are not so different after all, that we should view the statements at issue in both cases as nontestimonial. Since I have already used the expression “paying lip service,” allow me to invoke another speech-related expression: Justice Sotomayor is speaking out of both sides of her mouth. To be clear, I am not using this term to be critical of Justice Sotomayor. Far from it. For those of us who care about domestic violence and giving voice to those who are often voiceless, Justice Sotomayor has provided hope through a non-domestic-violence case, Michigan v. Bryant. Justice Sotomayor has set the groundwork—through her invocation of Ohio v. Roberts’s reliability test, through her weak distinction of Bryant and Hammon—to treat more statements describing domestic abuse, made in response to on-the-scene police questioning, as admissible even when victims are too afraid to testify at trial. Under this reading, even the victim in ADA Sotomayor’s early trial would likely be allowed a voice.
But there is yet a third way to read Michigan v. Bryant. This reading focuses less on Justice Sotomayor’s endgame—the revivification of Roberts and neutralization of Hammon—and more on the rhetoric Justice Sotomayor deploys to secure this outcome. Though the outcome is “left,” much of the rhetoric is in fact “right-friendly.” My concern here, in this brief section, is that Justice Sotomayor’s majority opinion can easily be read, or rather misread, as of a piece with larger efforts to perpetuate a “culture of fear.” The danger is that her language is ripe for being co-opted by the right.
So the question must be asked: what does it do to the culture when the Supreme Court suggests that every shooter at large presents an ongoing threat to the public, especially when about a third of all homicides in the United States currently go unsolved? How does Justice Sotomayor’s repeated linkage of danger and public spaces (“We now face a new context: a nondomestic dispute, involving a victim found in a public location”73) fit into notions that not only designate the home as a private sphere, but also a less serious one for criminal law intervention?74 How does this narrative of ongoing danger play into police uses of excessive force, or the ratcheting up of stop-and-frisks in cities like New York, purportedly to ensure officer safety? How does this narrative play into public fears about increasing crime rates, even in the face of evidence to the contrary? At a time when so many of us are concerned about the normalization of mass incarceration—when we live in a country that, between 1970 and 2005, increased its prison population by 628%, and now incarcerates 25% of all of the prisoners in the world—what does Justice Sotomayor’s language about ongoing danger to the public do?75 And how does it fit into the NRA’s argument—yes, I’m simplifying here, but still—that we all should be armed?
And here is my ultimate concern. I mentioned earlier that it is not uncommon for Critical Race Theorists to invoke the notion of using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, and that my second reading of Michigan v. Bryant is consistent with this notion. In truth, the actual expression, which comes from the poet Audre Lorde, is that the master’s tools can never destroy the master’s house.76 The master’s tools can only provide fleeting victories. Rather, what is needed to effect real change is new tools. All of which raises the question: Justice Sotomayor may have been successful in designing a return to Roberts and the neutralization of Hammon—but in doing so, has she left the house intact? And by using the master’s tools—legal precedent and law-and-order rhetoric—is it possible, really, to do otherwise?
I believe this constructive aspect of reading segues nicely into the question of just how the Confrontation Clause should be interpreted. It is here that I advance an argument put forward by David Alan Sklansky.81 I advance his argument here for two reasons. One, I think it is sensible. And two, if it is true, as Chief Justice Roberts has suggested, that legal scholarship is increasingly irrelevant to judicial decisionmaking,82 then maybe I can do my bit to change that by taking advantage of this opportunity to have a potential audience in Justice Sotomayor. Sklansky’s suggestion is wonderfully straightforward: that in muddling through what the Confrontation Clause means and how it should be applied, we should not lose sight of the primary reason we have the Sixth Amendment and more broadly the Bill of Rights: to safeguard the fairness of criminal proceedings.83 In short, beyond the goal of fidelity to the literal text with questionable citations to Webster’s dictionary, beyond the goal of practicality or pragmatism that seems to inform the outcome of recent Confrontation Clause decisions—think not just of Bryant, but also of Giles v. California84 and Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts85—there should also be the goal of providing a fair trial and securing justice.
After all, as Sklansky reminds us, when the Court unanimously ruled in Pointer v. Texas86 that the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause had been incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and thus was binding on the states, the Court offered a reason that bears repeating: the right of an accused to confront and cross-examine the witnesses against him is “essential” and “fundamental . . . for the kind of fair trial which is this country’s constitutional goal.”87 To again borrow from Sklansky: “The ordinary, working assumption of the law is that ambiguous language should be interpreted with an eye to its underlying aims. Interpreting the Confrontation Clause without regard for its purpose seems like a bad idea. It seems like a good way to allow the purpose to get lost.”88 Of course, to say that the Confrontation Clause should be interpreted in light of its underlying goal of fairness does not necessarily answer what test or rule should emerge. But it does set a starting point.89 And an ending point. The task is simply to heed it.
In the foregoing, I have offered three readings of Michigan v. Bryant. But still, I am left with questions. As a critical race theorist, I am reminded of those questions Margaret Montoya had as a student of criminal law, wanting to know about the lives of the people in the cases.90 I am reminded too of Mari Matsuda’s admonishment that we remember to “look to the bottom”91 and “ask the other question.”92 These are the questions I find myself still asking. What happened to Amy Hammon? What happened to Michelle McCottry? Are they okay, and have we protected them?
My hope is that Justice Sotomayor’s decision to include this exchange speaks volumes, and bodes well not just for Justice Sotomayor, or the future of criminal procedure, but the future of criminal justice as well.
I. Bennett Capers is a Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. He holds a B.A. from Princeton University and J.D. from Columbia Law School, and was an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1995-2004. For quick research help, he is indebted to his research assistants, Janeen Hall, Tobias Schad, and Samantha Simchowitz, and to his librarian, Kathleen Darvil.
Preferred citation: I. Bennett Capers, Reading Michigan v. Bryant, “Reading” Justice Sotomayor, 123 Yale L.J. F. 427 (2014), http://yalelawjournal.org/forum/reading-michigan-v-bryant-reading-justice-sotomayor.
Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World 299 (2013).
131 S. Ct. 1143 (2011).
See I. Bennett Capers, Reading Back, Reading Black, 35 Hofstra L. Rev. 9, 10 (2006).
George Fisher, Evidence 589 (3d ed. 2013).
Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, 50 (2004).
599 U.S. 970 (2010) (mem.) (granting certiorari).
Bryant, 131 S. Ct. at 1150.
Sotomayor, supra note 1, at 201.
131 S. Ct. 1143, 1157 (2011).
Id. at 1157 (citations omitted).
Id. at 1174-75 (Scalia, J., dissenting) (citations omitted).
Bryant, 131 S. Ct. at 1158.
Bryant, 131 S. Ct. at 1159.
See sources cited supra note 60.
Bryant, 131 S. Ct. at 1161.
Sotomayor, supra note 1, at 201; see also supra note 60 and accompanying text.
Bryant, 131 S. Ct. at 1168 (Scalia, J., dissenting).
Bryant, 131 S. Ct. at 1163-64.
Id. at 1171 (Scalia, J., dissenting).
Id. at 1156 (majority opinion).
See Lorde, supra note 45, at 112.
See Sklansky, supra note 58.
Sklansky, supra note 58, at 103.
Sklansky, supra note 58, at 108.
Sotomayor, supra note 1, at 299.
See, e.g., Rebecca K. Lee, Sonia Sotomayor: Role Model of Empathy and Purposeful Ambition, 98 Minn. L. Rev. 73 (2013) (reviewing Sotomayor, supra note 1); Andrea Grossman, The Judge and the Housewife: U.S. Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Eva Longoria in L.A., Huffington Post, Jan. 10, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrea-grossman/the-judge-and-the -housewi_b_2443741.html (“United States Justice Sonia Sotomayor is a rock star.”); Jodi Kantor, On Book-Tour Circuit, Sotomayor Sees a New Niche for a Justice, N.Y. Times, Feb. 3, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/us/politics/book-tour-rock-star-sotomayor-sees -an-even-higher-calling.html (describing celebrity-like status of Justice Sotomayor as first Hispanic justice).
See Sonia Sotomayor, Oyez, http://www.oyez.org/justices/sonia_sotomayor (last updated Mar. 10, 2014).
See Read, Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=read (last visited Mar. 12, 2014) (“To tell someone about themself, mostly used by gay black men.”).
Daniel J. Capra, Amending the Hearsay Exception for Declarations Against Penal Interest in the Wake of Crawford, 105 Colum. L. Rev. 2409, 2410 (2005).
Under Roberts, the Sixth Amendment did not bar admission of statements of an unavailable witness if the statements bore adequate “indicia of reliability,” which could be established if the evidence fell “within a firmly rooted hearsay exception” or otherwise bore “particularized guarantees of trustworthiness.” Id. at 66.
The Ohio v. Roberts approach itself was not without its critics and detractors. See, e.g., Akhil Amar, The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles 125-31 (1997); John G. Douglass, Beyond Admissibility: Real Confrontation, Virtual Cross-Examination, and the Right to Confront Hearsay, 67 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 191 (1999); Richard D. Friedman, Confrontation: The Search for Basic Principles, 86 Geo. L.J. 1011 (1998); Randolph N. Jonakait, Restoring the Confrontation Clause to the Sixth Amendment, 35 UCLA L. Rev. 557 (1988).
Jason Widdison, Comment, Michigan v. Bryant: The Ghost of Roberts and the Return of Reliability, 47 Gonz. L. Rev. 219, 225 (2011). Justice Marshall made a similar observation: “If ‘indicia of reliability’ are so easy to come by, and prove so much, then it is only reasonable to ask whether the Confrontation Clause has any independent vitality at all . . . .” Dutton v. Evans, 400 U.S. 74, 110 (1970) (Marshall, J., dissenting).
See, e.g., Robert Tharp, Domestic Violence Cases Face New Test: Ruling that Suspects Can Confront Accusers Scares Some Victims from Court, Dall. Morning News, July 6, 2004, at 1A.
See, e.g., Adam Liptak, Jury Can Hear Dying Man’s Words, Justices Say, N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/us/01scotus.html.
Not only are dying declarations generally excluded from the ban against hearsay, see Fed. R. Evid. 804(b)(2), but the Court had also intimated in Crawford that dying declarations, even if testimonial, were sui generis and would possibly be admissible as a historical exception to the Confrontation Clause. Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, 56 n.6 (2004); see also Giles v. California, 554 U.S. 353, 358 (2008) (noting an exception at common law for dying declarations); Peter Nicolas, “I’m Dying to Tell You What Happened”: The Admissibility of Testimonial Dying Declarations Post-Crawford, 37 Hastings Const. L.Q. 487, 492 (2010) (observing that the Giles Court “effectively assumes that a dying declaration exception to the Confrontation Clause exists”). The Bryant Court declined to decide whether the victim’s statement would fall under a dying declaration historical exception to the Confrontation Clause since the State did not press that exception below, and instead relied entirely on the excited utterance exception. Michigan v. Bryant, 131 S. Ct. 1143, 1151 n.1 (2011).
Id. at 1156 (internal citation omitted). Of course, that the Court found it necessary to clarify what it meant by “primary purpose” and “ongoing emergency” also reveals a larger problem with the process of interpretation, and specifically with the notion of original intent. The import of Justice Scalia’s vigorous dissent in Michigan v. Bryant is that, “When we said X in Crawford and Davis (both opinions I authored) we meant X, not Y as the majority now claims.” But if the Court has difficulty determining what all nine Justices meant when they signed onto Justice Scalia’s “primary purpose” test, how can the Court possibly determine what each of the Framers of the Constitution meant by a particular provision?
Id. at 1165 (quoting Davis v. Washington, 547 U.S. 813, 822 (2006)).
Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (2007).
See, e.g., Paul Butler, Racially Based Jury Nullification: Black Power in the Criminal Justice System, 105 Yale L.J. 677, 680 (1995) (“Through jury nullification, I want to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.”); Richard Delgado, Derrick Bell’s Toolkit—Fit to Dismantle that Famous House?, 75 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 283, 285 & n.11 (2000) (describing “how marginalized groups may sometimes, jiu-jitsu fashion, turn the master’s tools into a device for dismantling that famous house”); Leslie Espinoza & Angela P. Harris, Afterword: Embracing the Tar-Baby—LatCrit Theory and the Sticky Mess of Race, 85 Calif. L. Rev. 1585, 1611 (1997) (“We use the master’s tools to try to dismantle the master’s house . . . .”); Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Using the Master’s “Tool” to Dismantle His House: Why Justice Clarence Thomas Makes the Case for Affirmative Action, 47 Ariz. L. Rev. 113 (2005). Scholars in other disciplines have also embraced this mantra. “Only the master’s tools,” says Henry Louis Gates, “will ever dismantle the master’s house.” Henry Gates, Jr., Critical Remarks, in Anatomy of Racism 319, 326 (David Theo Goldberg ed., 1990). The “master’s tools” adage itself is a famous line from feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lorde. See Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde 110, 112 (1984).
I am certainly not the first observer to identify certain episodes in a Justice’s life and speculate about how those episodes shaped his or her jurisprudence. See, e.g., Linda Greenhouse, Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey (2006); Tracey Maclin, Justice Thurgood Marshall: Taking the Fourth Amendment Seriously, 77 Cornell L. Rev. 723 (1992).
Imagine ADA Sotomayor’s case. In that case, occurring as it did under the Ohio v. Roberts regime, the initial statements made by the wife to the police would likely have been admissible, even if she refused to testify, under the excited utterance or present sense impression exceptions to the ban against hearsay. Furthermore, as “firmly rooted” hearsay exceptions, the admission of these statements would not have offended the husband’s confrontation rights under the then-applicable constitutional rule. But post-Crawford, the result would likely be far different. The wife’s statements to the police, especially if her husband was already restrained, would more likely be considered testimonial and hence inadmissible at trial unless she herself testified. Securing a conviction would be significantly more difficult.
Her one concession is related to this new context. She states that this “new context requires us to provide additional clarification as to what Davis meant by ‘the primary purpose of the interrogation is to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency.’” Id. at 1156 (quoting Davis v. Washington, 547 U.S. 813, 822 (2006)). But beyond this concession, Justice Sotomayor implies that the majority is merely following precedent.
See David Alan Sklansky, Confrontation and Fairness, 45 Tex. Tech L. Rev. 103, 106 (2012) (arguing that Justice Sotomayor privileges reliability in Confrontation Clause analysis).
As Donna Wills observes, domestic violence “impacts everyone: children, neighbors, extended family, the workplace, hospital emergency rooms, good samaritans who were killed while trying to intervene.” Donna Wills,Domestic Violence: The Case for Aggressive Prosecution, 7 UCLA Women’s L.J. 173, 174 (1997). Statistics from a Washington State study support this point. The study found that 313 domestic violence fatality cases involved a total of 416 deaths. The deaths included 23 children, 33 friends or family members of the primary victim, 19 current boyfriends of the primary victim, one co-worker of the primary victim, and three responding officers. See Kelly Starr et al., Every Life Lost Is a Call for Change: Findings and Recommendations from the Washington State Domestic Violence Fatality Review, Wash. St. Coal. Against Domestic Violence 17-18 (Dec. 2004), http://www.markwynn .com/wp-content/uploads/Washington-State-Fatality-Report.pdf. A national study of officers murdered in the line of duty between 1996 and 2009 reported in Police Chief Magazine is equally revealing. Of the 771 law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty during this period, 14% were murdered responding to a domestic violence call for service. Shannon Meyer, When Officers Die: Understanding Deadly Domestic Violence Calls for Service, Police Chief Mag., May 2011, http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm ?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=2378&issue_id=52011.
As others have noted, Justice Sotomayor is particularly attentive to the facts and the record below. See, e.g., Anna C. Henning & Kenneth R. Thomas, Cong. Research Serv., R40649, Judge Sonia Sotomayor: Analysis of Selected Opinions 19 (2009), http:// http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40649.pdf (commenting on Justice Sotomayor’s “meticulous evaluation of the particular facts at issue in a case”); Rachel E. Barkow, Justice Sotomayor and Criminal Justice in the Real World, 123 Yale L.J. F. 409, 410 (2014), http://yalelawjournal .org/forum/justice-sotomayor-and-criminal-justice-in-the-real-world (“Justice Sotomayor’s view in criminal cases is firmly grounded in how things actually work in practice, and she pays close attention to the specific facts of cases before her.”). My point here is that Justice Sotomayor is not beyond emphasizing particular facts and de-emphasizing others as a means to an end.
For discussion of some of the leeway lower courts have had in applying Crawford, see Dylan O. Keenan, Note, Confronting Crawford v. Washington in the Lower Courts, 122 Yale L.J. 782 (2012).
For discussion of these issues, see Jeannie Suk, At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution Is Transforming Privacy (2009); and I. Bennett Capers, Home Is Where the Crime Is, 109 Mich. L. Rev. 979 (2011). Particularly troubling is the assertion, taken from Hammon but repeated in Bryant, that although a husband had minutes earlier shoved his wife down on the floor into broken glass, hit her in the chest, thrown her down again, and attacked her daughter, there was “‘no emergency in progress.’” Bryant, 131 S. Ct. at 1154 (quoting Hammon v. Indiana, 547 U.S. 813, 829 (2006)). I suspect we may one day view this language with the same discomfit with which we view Justice White’s assertion in Coker v Georgia, a case in which a woman was forcibly raped at knifepoint, that the victim was “unharmed.” Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584, 587 (1977).
Some years ago, Stephanos Bibas queried whether Justice Scalia had positioned himself as an “unlikely friend” of criminal defendants in Crawford. See Stephanos Bibas, Originalism and Formalism in Criminal Procedure: The Triumph of Justice Scalia, the Unlikely Friend of Criminal Defendants?, 94 Geo. L.J. 183 (2005). Linda Greenhouse made a similar observation. See Linda Greenhouse, Supreme Court Roundup; Court Alters Rule on Statements of Unavailable Witnesses, N.Y. Times, March 9, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com /2004/03/09/us/supreme-court-roundup-court-alters-rule-on-statements-of-unavailable -witnesses.html. My questions here ask how Justice Sotomayor has positioned herself, not just for criminal defendants, but for us all.
Presumably this would be the case if trustworthy out-of-court statements were admissible against criminal defendants.
An example of this is the way Justice Sotomayor, known for her commitment to the facts, see supra note 66, is more than capable of “massaging” the facts when it serves her purpose. As my readings suggest, she is also sensitive to other facts, i.e., the realities of most domestic violence cases.
The quoted definition is from the Online Slang Dictionary. See Definition of Read, Online Slang Dictionary, http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/read (last visited Mar. 9, 2014). A similar definition appears in the Urban Dictionary. See Read, supra note 6.
“No tea, no shade” can be translated as, “No disrespect, but I need to tell you how it really is.” A similar definition appears in the Urban Dictionary. See No Tea No Shade, Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=No+Tea+No+Shade (last visited Mar. 12, 2014) (“A phrase you add at the beginning or the end of a sentence that can be seen as negative to somebody, but its not supposed to be, and just stating the obvious.”).
Jess Bravin, ChiefJustice Robertson Obama, Justice Stevens, LawReviews, More, Wall St. J.: Law Blog (Apr. 7, 2010, 7:20 PM), http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/04/07/chief-justice -roberts-on-obama-justice-stevens-law-reviews-more; cf. Daniel Solove, ChiefJustice Robertsand Legal Scholarship, Concurring Opinions (Apr. 8, 2010, 12:26 PM), http://www .concurringopinions.com/archives/2010/04/chief-justice-roberts-and-legal-scholarship.html (finding Chief Justice Roberts’s view “kind of glib and dismissive”).
At least in the context of Giles, then, the Justices’ long originalist debate was neither here nor there. In the modern realm of domestic-violence prosecutions, the Justices seemed prepared in many cases to infer from the course of abuse the defendant’s purpose to keep his victim from the witness stand.
Fisher, supra note 8, at 624.
557 U.S. 305 (2009). In Melendez-Diaz, the Court hinted at a pragmatic solution to the confrontation problem by introducing lab reports created by non-testifying witnesses at trial. That solution is now being incorporated into the Federal Rules of Evidence. See Fed. R. Evid. 803(10) (proposed amendment) (allowing for a certification and waiver process).
could start from the proposition that [the Confrontation Clause] was aimed at making trials fair and could use that aim as guidance in fleshing out the content of the right to confrontation—not by assuming anything fair counts as adequate confrontation, but by interpreting the right in ways that promote the underlying objective of fairness.
See Margaret E. Montoya, Mascaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/making the Self While Un/braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, 17 Harv. Women’s L.J. 185 (1994).
See Mari J. Matsuda, Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations, 22 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 323, 324 (1987).
See Mari J. Matsuda, Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory Out of Coalition, 43 Stan. L. Rev. 1183, 1189 (1991) (proposing “asking the other question” as a method of uncovering and understanding how different forms of subordination interact).

References: v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
sui generis
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v.