Opinion ID: 3169888
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Admission of Autopsy Report into Evidence

Text: On appeal, the Defendant argues that the admission into evidence of the autopsy report prepared by Dr. Sandra K. Elkins violated the Defendant‘s constitutional right to confront the witnesses against him because the Defendant did not have the opportunity to cross-examine Dr. Elkins. The Defendant contends that the autopsy report in this case must be classified as testimonial, given the close relationship between law enforcement and the medical examiner and the fact that the Defendant was in custody as the suspected perpetrator at the time the autopsy was performed. As such, he insists, the autopsy report should have been excluded, and its admission into evidence violated his rights under the Confrontation Clause of the United States Constitution and article I, section 9 of the Tennessee Constitution. The Court of Criminal Appeals rejected this argument. Hutchison, 2014 WL 1423240, at -31. It relied on the intermediate appellate court‘s decision in State v. Dotson, No. W2011-00815-CCA-R3-DD, 2013 WL 4728679, at  (Tenn. Crim. App. June 25, 2013), in which the Court of Criminal Appeals concluded that it was not error to admit into evidence an autopsy report prepared by a different medical examiner than the one who testified at trial, because the primary purpose of the autopsy report ―was not to target the defendant as the perpetrator but instead to identify the injuries sustained by the victims and their causes of death.‖ Hutchison, 2014 WL 1423240, at  (quoting Dotson, 2013 WL 4728679, at ). The Court of Criminal Appeals acknowledged that, unlike Dotson, the Defendant in this case was in custody at the time of the autopsy. - 11 - Nevertheless, the majority held that the purpose of the autopsy in this case was to identify the injuries sustained by the victim, not to target an individual, so the autopsy report was not testimonial and its admission into evidence did not violate the Confrontation Clause. Id. The dissenting member of the panel disagreed with the conclusion that the autopsy report was not testimonial under the Confrontation Clause but also concluded that any such error was harmless. Id. at -41 (Tipton, P.J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). Soon after Court of Criminal Appeals issued its decision in the instant case, we rendered our decision in Dotson, affirming the decision of the intermediate appellate court on which the Court of Criminal Appeals below relied. State v. Dotson, 450 S.W.3d 1 (Tenn. 2014). Our opinion in Dotson included an extensive review of recent jurisprudence on the Confrontation Clause in a similar context. See id. at 62-70. In Dotson, however, the defendant failed to object to the admission of the autopsy reports in question, so this Court limited its analysis to a plain-error review. Id. at 70. As a consequence, after setting forth a detailed analytical framework, the Dotson Court held only that no clear rule of law was breached by the admission into evidence of the autopsy reports; the Court did not decide whether the autopsy reports were testimonial or whether a medical examiner may testify about an autopsy report produced by another medical examiner who does not testify at trial. Id. at 72. In the instant case, those issues are squarely presented, so we will address them in accordance with the analytical framework outlined in Dotson.
The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution states: ―In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him.‖4 U.S. Const. amend. VI. Article I, section 9 of the Tennessee Constitution contains a similar provision; it states ―[t]hat in all criminal prosecutions, the accused hath the right . . . to meet the witnesses face to face.‖ Tenn. Const. art. I, § 9. This Court has held that this provision of the Tennessee Constitution imposes no restrictions on admitting hearsay statements beyond those of the federal constitution as interpreted in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), and its progeny. See State v. McCoy, 459 S.W.3d 1, 13-14 (Tenn. 2014). In deciding issues under the Confrontation Clause in the Tennessee Constitution, we apply the same analysis used to evaluate claims based on the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Thus, the Dotson Court explained, we ―unitarily analyze the [D]efendant‘s federal and state constitutional claims, as the same standards govern both.‖ Dotson, 450 S.W.3d at 62 (citing State v. Parker, 350 S.W.3d 883, 898 (Tenn. 2011); State v. Franklin, 308 S.W.3d 799, 809-10 (Tenn. 2010); State v. 4 The Confrontation Clause is made applicable to the States via the Fourteenth Amendment. Pointer v. Texas, 380 U.S. 400, 403 (1965). - 12 - Cannon, 254 S.W.3d 287, 301 (Tenn. 2008); State v. Lewis, 235 S.W.3d 136, 145 (Tenn. 2007)).
As noted in Dotson, ―the threshold question in every case where the Confrontation Clause is relied upon as a bar to the admission of an out-of-court statement is whether the challenged statement is testimonial.‖ Dotson, 450 S.W.3d at 63 (citing State v. Cannon, 254 S.W.3d 287, 301 (Tenn. 2008)); see also Crawford, 541 U.S. at 51-52. In Crawford, the United States Supreme Court observed, ―The text of the Confrontation Clause . . . applies to ‗witnesses‘ against the accused—in other words, those who ‗bear testimony.‘‖ Crawford, 541 U.S. at 51 (citing 2 N. Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)). In turn, ―[t]estimony . . . is typically ‗[a] solemn declaration or affirmation made for the purpose of establishing or proving some fact.‘‖ Id. (alteration in original) (quoting N. Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)). Thus, the Confrontation Clause applies only to ―testimonial statements‖ and is not implicated where the evidence in question is nontestimonial hearsay. Davis v. Washington, 547 U.S. 813, 823-24 (2006); see Dotson, 450 S.W.3d at 63. In Crawford, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to define the term ―testimonial‖ in the context of the Confrontation Clause, but instead it gave examples of statements that would be deemed testimonial: Various formulations of this core class of ―testimonial‖ statements exist: ―ex parte in-court testimony or its functional equivalent—that is, material such as affidavits, custodial examinations, prior testimony that the defendant was unable to cross-examine, or similar pretrial statements that declarants would reasonably expect to be used prosecutorially,‖ ―extrajudicial statements . . . contained in formalized testimonial materials, such as affidavits, depositions, prior testimony, or confessions,‖ ―statements that were made under circumstances which would lead an objective witness reasonably to believe that the statement would be available for use at a later trial.‖ These formulations all share a common nucleus and then define the Clause‘s coverage at various levels of abstraction around it. Regardless of the precise articulation, some statements qualify under any definition—for example, ex parte testimony at a preliminary hearing. Crawford, 541 U.S. at 51-52 (citations omitted); see also Dotson, 450 S.W.3d at 63-64. - 13 - In 2006, two years after Crawford, the U.S. Supreme Court in Davis v. Washington further addressed the difference between testimonial evidence and nontestimonial evidence. Davis, 547 U.S. at 822. The two can be distinguished, Davis explained, by looking at the ―primary purpose‖ of the statement: Statements are nontestimonial when made in the course of police interrogation under circumstances objectively indicating that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency. They are testimonial when the circumstances objectively indicate that there is no such ongoing emergency, and that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to establish or prove past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution. Id. Citing this language, the Dotson Court observed, ―in Davis, the Supreme Court instructed that the ‗primary purpose‘ of a statement marks the relevant dividing line‖ between testimonial and nontestimonial hearsay under the Confrontation Clause, with focus on whether the primary purpose of the statement was to meet an ongoing emergency or prove past events pertinent to a criminal prosecution. Dotson, 450 S.W.3d at 64 (citing Davis, 547 U.S. at 822).
The primary purpose test was applied in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts to determine whether the challenged evidence was testimonial for purposes of the Confrontation Clause. Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. 305 (2009). In that case, the defendant objected to the admission into evidence of ―certificates of analysis‖ that described the results of forensic testing and identified cocaine as the substance that had been in the possession of the defendant at the time of his arrest. Id. at 308-09. The certificates contained the notarized signature of the analyst who performed the forensic testing, but that analyst did not testify at the defendant‘s criminal trial. Id. The Court characterized the certificates as ―quite plainly affidavits‖ that fell within the ―core class of testimonial statements‖ described in Crawford. Id. at 310. As to the purpose of the notarized certificates, the Court said that each was a ―solemn declaration or affirmation made for the purpose of establishing or proving some fact‖ and providing ―prima facie evidence of the composition, quality, and the net weight of the analyzed substance.‖ Id. at 310, 311 (citations omitted). The Court concluded: ―Absent a showing that the analysts were unavailable to testify at trial and that [the defendant] had a prior opportunity to cross-examine them, [the defendant] was entitled to ‗be confronted with‘ the analysts at trial.‖ Id. at 311 (quoting Crawford, 541 U.S. at 54); see Ohio v. Clark, 135 S. Ct. 2173, 2180 (2015) (second alteration in original) (quoting Michigan v. Bryant, 562 U.S. 344, 358 (2011)) (―In the end, the question is whether, in light of all the circumstances, viewed objectively, the ‗primary purpose‘ of the [out-of-court statement] was to ‗creat[e] an out-of-court substitute for trial testimony.‘‖). - 14 - The difference between testimonial evidence and nontestimonial evidence was further explored in Bullcoming v. New Mexico, 131 S. Ct. 2705 (2011). In that case, the prosecution relied on a forensic laboratory report that certified the level of the defendant‘s blood-alcohol concentration, introduced into evidence as a business record. Id. at 2712. Instead of introducing the report into evidence through the testimony of the analyst who performed the testing, the prosecution called as a witness ―another analyst who was familiar with the laboratory‘s testing procedures, but had neither participated in nor observed the test on Bullcoming‘s blood sample.‖ Id. at 2709. The defendant objected, but the trial court allowed the report to be admitted as a business record. Id. at 2712. The New Mexico Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction, holding that the report was nontestimonial. State v. Bullcoming, 189 P.3d 679, 685 (N.M. Ct. App. 2008). The Supreme Court of New Mexico affirmed, State v. Bullcoming, 226 P.3d 1, 8-9 (N.M. 2010), and the defendant appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Bullcoming resulted in a four-member plurality opinion reversing the Court of