Opinion ID: 552159
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Analysis Under Ohio v. Roberts

Text: 7 The petitioner, as did the district court, relies heavily upon Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56, 100 S.Ct. 2531, 65 L.Ed.2d 597 (1980), in arguing that the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment was violated by the admission into evidence of the autopsy report without the presence and testimony of Dr. Zirkin, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy and prepared the report. At issue in Ohio v. Roberts, was the admissability of an absent witness's former testimony at a preliminary hearing. The Confrontation Clause provides, In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right ... to be confronted with the witnesses against him. The Roberts Court noted, If one were to read this language literally, it would require, on objection, the exclusion of any statement made by a declarant not present at trial.... But, if thus applied, the Clause would abrogate virtually every hearsay exception, a result long rejected as unintended and too extreme. 448 U.S. at 63, 100 S.Ct. at 2537. 4 8 In Roberts, the Court said the Confrontation Clause operates in two separate ways to restrict the range of admissible hearsay. First, it establishes a rule of necessity that in the usual case requires the prosecution either to produce, or demonstrate the unavailability of the declarant. And second, once the witness is shown to be unavailable, the Clause countenances only hearsay marked with such trustworthiness that 'there is no material departure from the reason of the general rule'.... Id., 65, 100 S.Ct. at 2539. The Court summarized: 9 In sum, when a hearsay declarant is not present for cross-examination at trial, the Confrontation Clause normally requires a showing that he is unavailable. Even then, his statement is admissible only if it bears adequate indicia of reliability. 5 Reliability can be inferred without more in a case where the evidence falls within a firmly rooted hearsay exception. In other cases, the evidence must be excluded, at least absent a showing of particularized guarantees of trustworthiness. 10 Id. at 66, 100 S.Ct. at 2539 (footnote added). 11 The Roberts Court went on to note that a declarant becomes unavailable for confrontation purposes when the prosecutor has made a good faith effort to produce the declarant at trial, Roberts, 448 U.S. at 74, 100 S.Ct. at 2543 (citing Barber v. Page, 390 U.S. 719, 724-25, 88 S.Ct. 1318, 1321-22, 20 L.Ed.2d 255 (1968)). Thus, under Roberts, admission of the autopsy report would conform to the Confrontation Clause only if the medical examiner who prepared it were shown to be unavailable and the report were found to bear adequate indicia of reliability. The Supreme Court of Rhode Island upheld express findings of the trial court both that Dr. Zirkin, the preparer of the report, was unavailable because he was residing in Israel and was no longer connected with the Office of the Medical Examiner, State v. Manocchio, 497 A.2d 1, 5 (R.I.1985), and that the 'underlying trustworthiness' surrounding the generation of the autopsy report justified its admission. Id. at 8. 12 The district court disagreed. It found that the state had not made a good faith effort to obtain Dr. Zirkin's testimony. He could easily have been deposed before he departed for Israel, said the court, or he could have been brought back from Israel to testify at the trial. The district court did not focus on the reliability, as such, of the autopsy report. However, it gave as a further ground for rejecting it the fact that it contained not only medical opinions but also a factual conclusion, id. at 478, (specifically, that decedent was beaten by unspecified assailants in a certain parking lot shortly before his death, information that the examiner had presumably obtained from the police report), as well as the examiner's conclusion that the manner of death was homicide. The district court stated, 13 Since petitioner was found guilty of manslaughter and since the only evidence of the corpus delicti [here, that the beating caused the death] was the opinion of an absent Medical Examiner, the conclusion is inescapable that the jury acted on the information and conclusions stated in the Medical Examiner's Report. This is error of constitutional dimension. 14 708 F.Supp. 473, 478. 15 While the Rhode Island Supreme Court and the district court joined issue on whether Dr. Zirkin was available, we do not find it necessary to resolve that question. Recent Supreme Court precedent indicates that, while reliability continues to be a key factor in Confrontation Clause analysis of hearsay, the declarant's availability, in a case like the present, is not. We explain why this is so. 16