Opinion ID: 3219008
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Crawford, Hearsay, and Expert Testimony

Text: The admission of expert testimony is governed not only by state evidence law, but also by the Sixth Amendment‟s Confrontation Clause, which provides that, “[i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” (U.S. Const., 6th Amend.) As the United States Supreme Court observed, “this bedrock procedural guarantee applies to both federal and state prosecutions.” (Crawford, supra, 541 U.S. at p. 42; see Pointer v. Texas (1965) 380 U.S. 400, 406.) “ „The main and essential purpose of confrontation is to secure for the opponent the opportunity of crossexamination.‟ ” (Davis v. Alaska (1974) 415 U.S. 308, 315-316.) “Crossexamination is the principal means by which the believability of a witness and the truth of his testimony are tested.” (Id. at p. 316.) Under previous United States Supreme Court precedent, the admission of hearsay did not violate the right to confrontation if it bore “adequate „indicia of reliability.‟ 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.” (Ohio v. Roberts (1980) 448 U.S. 56, 66.) Crawford overturned 14 the Roberts rule. Crawford clarified that a mere showing of hearsay reliability was insufficient to satisfy the confrontation clause. “To be sure, the Clause‟s ultimate goal is to ensure reliability of evidence, but it is a procedural rather than a substantive guarantee. . . . [¶] The Roberts test allows a jury to hear evidence, untested by the adversary process, based on a mere judicial determination of reliability. It thus replaces the constitutionally prescribed method of assessing reliability with a wholly foreign one.” (Crawford, supra, 541 U.S. at pp. 61-62.) Under Crawford, if an exception was not recognized at the time of the Sixth Amendment‟s adoption (see Crawford, at p. 56, fn. 6), admission of testimonial hearsay against a criminal defendant violates the confrontation clause unless (1) the declarant is unavailable to testify and (2) the defendant had a previous opportunity to cross-examine the witness or forfeited the right by his own wrongdoing. (Id. at pp. 62, 68; see Giles v. California (2008) 554 U.S. 353, 357373.)6 In light of our hearsay rules and Crawford, a court addressing the admissibility of out-of-court statements must engage in a two-step analysis. The first step is a traditional hearsay inquiry: Is the statement one made out of court; is it offered to prove the truth of the facts it asserts; and does it fall under a hearsay exception? If a hearsay statement is being offered by the prosecution in a criminal case, and the Crawford limitations of unavailability, as well as cross-examination or forfeiture, are not satisfied, a second analytical step is required. Admission of 6 Because Crawford is based on the Sixth Amendment right to confrontation, its rule has not been extended to civil proceedings or circumstances in which hearsay is offered by an accused in his own defense. Neither we nor the high court has had occasion to consider the rule when a defendant offers hearsay that may work to the detriment of a codefendant. 15 such a statement violates the right to confrontation if the statement is testimonial hearsay, as the high court defines that term. We turn first to the general hearsay inquiry. As discussed, some courts have attempted to avoid hearsay issues by concluding that statements related by experts are not hearsay because they “go only to the basis of [the expert‟s] opinion and should not be considered for their truth.” (Montiel, supra, 5 Cal.4th at p. 919; see Coleman, supra, 38 Cal.3d at p. 92.) If statements related by experts as bases for their opinions are not admitted for their truth, they are not hearsay. Neither the hearsay doctrine nor the confrontation clause is implicated when an out-of-court statement is not received to prove the truth of a fact it asserts. (See Crawford, supra, 541 U.S. at p. 59, fn. 9; Tennessee v. Street (1985) 471 U.S. 409, 413-414.) In the context of a confrontation challenge to the admission of certain expert “basis” testimony, the high court addressed the not-for-the-truth rationale in Williams v. Illinois (2012) 567 U.S. __ [132 S.Ct. 2221] (Williams). Williams was a rape prosecution in which the identity of the attacker was disputed. Semen samples were collected from the rape victim and sent to a Cellmark laboratory for DNA analysis. (Id. at p. __ [132 S.Ct. at p. 2229].) Cellmark produced a DNA profile purporting to be an accurate profile of the unknown semen donor. Independent of the rape investigation, a sample of Williams‟s DNA had been acquired and entered in the state‟s database. That “known” sample from Williams was tested and a profile produced. (Ibid.) At trial, a prosecution expert testified that she compared Williams‟s known profile to the Cellmark profile and, in her opinion, they matched. Williams objected that the Cellmark results, related to the 16 factfinder by the expert,7 constituted hearsay because they were out-of-court statements by the report writer and were offered to prove their truth: that the profile was, indeed, an accurate profile of the man who committed the rape for which Williams was being tried. Considering the hearsay question, a four-member plurality of the Williams court concluded statements in the Cellmark report were not admitted for their truth, but only to allow the judge, sitting as factfinder, to evaluate the testimony of the expert who opined that the two profiles matched. (Williams, supra, 567 U.S. at p. __ [132 S.Ct. at pp. 2240-2241] [plur. opn. of Alito, J.].) The plurality acknowledged that the prosecution expert “lacked personal knowledge that the profile produced by Cellmark was based on the vaginal swabs taken from the victim,” but reasoned the expert was testifying in the manner of a hypothetical question and any linkage between the sample from the victim to the DNA profile created by Cellmark “was a mere premise of the prosecutor‟s question, and [the expert] simply assumed that premise to be true when she gave her answer indicating that there was a match between the two DNA profiles. There is no reason to think that the trier of fact took [the expert‟s] answer as substantive evidence to establish where the DNA profiles came from.” (Id. at p. __ [132 S.Ct. at p. 2236].)