Opinion ID: 1494221
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Confrontation Clause Analysis of Hearsay Statements Admitted under the State of Mind Exception

Text: The next question is whether the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment operates to bar admission of the hearsay statements by Fahey that are admissible under the state of mind exception. [156] The Confrontation Clause provides defendants in criminal cases with the right to confront witnesses who testify against them. [157] Where hearsay statements by an unavailable declarant are admitted into evidence, the accused has no opportunity to test the veracity of those statements through cross-examination. [158] Before the State may present hearsay statements against the accused in a criminal prosecution, the State [159] must therefore establish (1) that the hearsay was admitted under a firmly rooted exception to the hearsay rule or (2) that the contested statements possess particularized guarantees of trustworthiness `such that adversarial testing would be expected to add little, if anything, to the statements' reliability.' [160] Where hearsay testimony is admitted pursuant to a firmly rooted exception, it is not necessary to make a particularized assessment of the statement's reliability. [161] To determine whether an exception to the hearsay rule is firmly rooted, the Court must find that the statements admissible under the exception are invariably trustworthy. This finding depends in part on the longevity and widespread acceptance of the hearsay exception by courts and legislatures. [162] Based on the longstanding judicial precedent establishing the propriety of admitting statements under the state of mind exception, [163] this Court declared the state of mind exception, as defined in Derrickson, to be firmly rooted for purposes of the Confrontation Clause. [164] Following this established jurisprudence, we find that D.R.E. 803(3) is a firmly rooted hearsay exception under the Confrontation Clause. [165] We therefore conclude that the admissible hearsay testimony concerning Fahey's emotional state is admissible under a firmly rooted hearsay exception and satisfies the requirements of the Confrontation Clause.