Opinion ID: 1399473
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Confrontation Clause Issue

Text: Count Six charged Wright with aiding and abetting William Williams and Rashawn Long in shooting and wounding Anthony Conaway and Justin Hill during an attempted PCP robbery on February 1, 2001. Before Conaway testified, Wright objected that testimony relating what Michael Birks said to Conaway that evening would violate Wright's Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause rights because Birks was murdered later that night and therefore was unavailable and had not been subject to cross examination. The district court overruled the objection, and Conaway testified that Birks told him who had participated in the shooting. On appeal, Wright argues that this testimony violated his Confrontation Clause rights as construed in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, 124 S.Ct. 1354, 158 L.Ed.2d 177 (2004). Crawford recognized a common law forfeiture by wrongdoing exception to the right of confrontation, id. at 62, 124 S.Ct. 1354, but the exception does not apply, Wright contends, because the government failed to prove that Birks was murdered for the purpose of preventing him from testifying. [3] However, the Confrontation Clause only bars admission of testimonial statements of a witness who did not appear at trial unless he was unavailable to testify, and the defendant had had a prior opportunity for cross-examination. Davis v. Washington, 547 U.S. 813, 821, 126 S.Ct. 2266, 165 L.Ed.2d 224 (2006) (emphasis added), quoting Crawford, 541 U.S. at 53-54, 124 S.Ct. 1354. Thus, the threshold Confrontation Clause issue is whether Birks's statement to Conaway was testimonial. The Supreme Court has not comprehensively defined testimonial statements. In Davis, it held that statements made in a 911 call to describe current circumstances requiring police assistance are not testimonial. 547 U.S. at 827, 126 S.Ct. 2266. Applying Davis, we held in United States v. Johnson, 495 F.3d 951, 976 (8th Cir. 2007), that remarks about murders made by one inmate to another fall safely outside the scope of testimonial hearsay. And in Giles, the Court recently observed in dicta that [s]tatements to friends and neighbors about abuse and intimidation, and statements to physicians in the course of receiving treatment, are not testimonial. 128 S.Ct. at 2692-93. Reviewing the statements made by Birks to Conaway in the context of these decisions, we agree with the government that the statements were not testimonial. Therefore, Wright's Confrontation Clause rights were not violated.