Opinion ID: 785213
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Appellate Jurisdiction to Review The Merits of the Appellate Division's Decision

Text: 23 As to the first prong of the collateral order doctrine, the Appellate Division's order did not conclusively resolve much of anything. To be sure, it established some guideposts for too much and too little redaction, but at bottom, it remanded the issue to the Territorial Court to settle on the exact redaction to use. 24 On the second prong, the redaction question is clearly separable from the merits, and this favors appealability. The question about the redactions goes to how much identifying information can be contained in a nontestifying codefendant's statement and still preserve the other defendants' Confrontation Clause rights. This is an exercise in applied constitutional law, as it were, and it does not implicate the merits of whether some or all of the defendants did or did not participate in the robbery-murder of the victim. As for the importance of the question, there are mixed signals. On the one hand, the Confrontation Clause articulates a fundamental constitutional right, and one might assume that such rights cry out most strongly for vindication on interlocutory appeal. Cf., e.g., P.R. Aqueduct & Sewer Auth. v. Metcalf & Eddy, Inc., 506 U.S. 139, 145, 113 S.Ct. 684, 121 L.Ed.2d 605 (1993) (holding that determination of sovereign immunity was a proper subject for interlocutory appeal because it involves a claim to a fundamental constitutional protection). On the other hand, Confrontation Clause rights are vindicated through evidentiary rulings, and a prime target of the policy against interlocutory appeals is the avoidance of piecemeal review of the many evidentiary rulings in a typical case. Thus we find this factor inconclusive. 25 The third prong strongly disfavors appealability. Practice alone—in Bruton and Gray themselves—suggests that interlocutory appeal is unwarranted because the constitutional defect in Bruton's and Gray's trials were, in fact, remedied by vacating their convictions and remanding for a new trial. 6 26 In sum, the prongs range from inconclusive to strongly disfavoring appealability. As the collateral order doctrine is a narrow exception and the Supreme Court has described the conditions for collateral order appeal as stringent, Digital Equip. Corp. v. Desktop Direct, Inc., 511 U.S. 863, 868, 114 S.Ct. 1992, 128 L.Ed.2d 842 (1994), failure to meet one prong makes the doctrine inapplicable no matter how compelling the other prongs may be (and here, not even one prong is in favor of appealability). Thus we conclude that this Court does not have appellate jurisdiction to hear an appeal of the merits of the Appellate Division's order. 27