Opinion ID: 767804
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Testimony as to Shergill's State of Mind (Hearsay Evidence).

Text: 40 The Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause, applicable to state prisoners through the Fourteenth Amendment, requires that in order to introduce relevant statements at trial, state prosecutors either produce the declarants of those statements as witnesses at trial or demonstrate their unavailability. See, e.g., Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56, 65-66 (1980). Moreover, in the event that state prosecutors successfully demonstrate the declarants' unavailability, they still must show that the hearsay statements sought to be introduced bear some adequate indicia of reliability, for example, by falling within a firmly rooted exception to the hearsay rule. See, e.g., White v. Illinois, 502 U.S. 346, 356 (1992). 41 In the present case, the California Court of Appeal impliedly concluded that the admission of the hearsay evidence of Shergill's fear that Bains's family might try to hurt or kill him was not error of constitutional magnitude, and the district court seems to have only assumed as much. This error, however, violated Bains's Sixth Amendment right to confront the witnesses against him. The prosecutor did not and quite obviously could not produce Shergill, the murder victim, as a witness at trial. Moreover, as the California Court of Appeal concluded as a matter of state law, and as we find to be correct as a matter of federal law, evidence of Shergill's beliefs about the Bains family's intentions toward him was not admissible under the exception to the hearsay rule for statements of the declarant's state of mind (or any other exception) in order to prove the truth of those beliefs. See, e.g., Fed. R. Evid. 803(3); United States v. Fontenot, 14 F.3d 1364, 1371 (9th Cir. 1994). Thus, under clearly established federal law, we hold that the admission of such hearsay evidence clearly violated Bains's Sixth Amendment right to confront the witnesses against him. See, e.g., id. 42