Opinion ID: 2613142
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the child's testimony.

Text: The trial court appears to have excluded the child's testimony under its interpretation of the Confrontation Clause requirements. The trial court did not rule whether or not the child was competent under I.R.E. 601. The parties cite no authority for the proposition that allowing the child to testify raises Confrontation Clause issues, nor does the record reveal any authority that supports the trial court's ruling. In Wright, the child was unavailable to testify and the issue was whether her doctor could testify regarding the child's statements. In this case, the child was available, unless the trial court determined that the child was not competent to testify. The question of the purported tainting of the child's testimony is a question of competency, not a Confrontation Clause issue. The admission of the child's testimony should be governed by general rules of competency, which define who is legally capable of testifying. Every person is competent to be a witness ... [unless a court finds that a person is] incapable of receiving just impressions of the facts respecting which they are examined, or of relating them truly. I.R.E. 601(a). Although the common law at one time automatically disqualified children as competent witnesses, the trend of the law favors general competency. State v. Iwakiri, 106 Idaho 618, 622, 682 P.2d 571, 575 (1984). The Iwakiri Court refused to adopt a per se rule of rejecting hypnotically induced testimony and adopted a totality of the circumstances test and outlined several safeguards for the general guidance of trial courts. Id. at 625, 682 P.2d at 578. The Court recommended videotaping hypnotic sessions, but did not mandate it. Id. In this case, the trial court did not make a finding whether the child was competent to testify under I.R.E. 601. Several of the trial court's statements, when read separately, do suggest that the trial court concluded that the child would not be able to relate the facts truly, as is required under I.R.E. 601. For example, the trial court stated during the status conference that based on State v. Wright , et al, and based on these interviews that the evidence has been tainted. The trial court reached this conclusion, however, by applying its interpretation of the Confrontation Clause requirements. The trial court stated: I'm talking about ... the protection of the defendant's constitutional rights. Specifically, the right to confront the evidence against him. And the case law seems to say, when you have a young child, these interviewsthere is a formula you have got to use to conduct them. And, very frankly, this formula wasn't followed, or wasn't even close. The trial court repeated this analysis in the hearing on the morning the trial was set to begin. Poole argues on appeal that in addition to I.R.E. 601(a), the magistrate should have applied I.C. § 9-202(2), which provides that children under ten cannot be witnesses if they appear incapable of receiving just impressions of the facts or of relating them truly. In State v. Zimmerman, 121 Idaho 971, 973, 829 P.2d 861, 863 (1992), the Court held that I.C. § 19-3024, which permits the admission of a child's out-of-court statement of physical or sexual abuse, is invalid to the extent that it attempts to prescribe admissibility of hearsay and is in conflict with I.R.E. 1102. The same is true of I.C. § 9-202(2).