Court Opinion

ID: 9661190
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 22:31:56.271471+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:25.883953
License: Public Domain

JOsephine Linker Hart, Judge, concurring in part, dissenting in part. I agree that this case must be reversed and remanded. However, I believe that the majority has adopted a far too restrictive view of what constitutes “testimonial hearsay,” and therefore, I write separately. As the majority notes, when the Supreme Court handed down Crawford, it expressly stated that it did not intend to exhaustively define testimonial hearsay, but noted “at a minimum” it included prior testimony at a preliminary hearing and police interrogation. I do not disagree with the majority’s conclusion that the hearsay statements allegedly made by JB to social worker Trish Smith, who was a mandatory reporter, should have been excluded, as Smith’s testimony violated Seely’s rights under the Confrontation Clause. I believe that the majority’s reasoning was sound in this instance: because Smith’s questioning of the child was not necessitated by exigent circumstances and involved the “accompanying formality” that we associate with police interrogation, the hearsay in this instance was closely akin to the Crawford Court’s “minimum” definition of “testimonial hearsay.” I do not, however, believe that their analysis properly excludes the hearsay statements that were allegedly made to Suzette Barnes. I believe they wrongly rely on United States v. Manfre, 368 F.3d 832 (8th Cir. 2004), asserting that it stands for the proposition that a hearsay statement made to “loved ones or acquaintances” does not violate the Confrontation Clause. Furthermore, I believe they mischaracterize the evidence when they assert that Barnes’s questioning of her daughter “was not formal or in the nature of an interrogation.” In the first place, Manfre’s analysis of Crawford was confined to a footnote because the Supreme Court had handed down Crawford after the Eighth Circuit had taken Manfre under submission. Needless to say, the implications of Cranford were not briefed at any level, and of course, the fact that the Eighth Circuit’s whole Crauford analysis was confined to a footnote makes it mere dicta. If, for argument’s sake, I were to accept the premise that Manfre was even persuasive authority, it is so factually distinguishable as to make it completely inapplicable to the case at bar. First and foremost, the Manfre statements could not by themselves establish that a crime had been committed. The hearsay statements merely offered an explanation about the declarant’s discussion about a propane tank with his former employer after a phone call that was partially overheard by a co-conspirator’s half-brother. The sponsor of the hearsay statement had no more than a casual interest in the declarant’s statements at the time they were made, and in fact, he ascribed no importance to the statements whatsoever until several months later when he was contacted by federal authorities pursuant to an arson investigation following a fire that took his brother’s life. Conversely, the victim’s alleged statements constituted almost all of the evidence in the instant case and independently supplied proof of all of the elements of rape. Additionally, the rule that the majority purports to lift from Manfre — that admission of hearsay statements made to family members does not violate the Confrontation Clause — is all but cut out of whole cloth. I submit that it would not matter if the hearsay statements in Manfre were made to family members or the Director of the F.B.I. I also disagree with the majority’s assertion that the lack of “formality” is a determinative factor in deciding whether or not the alleged victim’s statements to her mother constituted testimonial hearsay. Here, the supposed lack of “formality” is illusory at best. As the majority notes, the statement was elicited from JB after repeated questioning by one of the most imposing authority figures in any three-year-old’s life — the child’s mother. I note that the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment states in pertinent part that: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to ... be confronted with the witnesses against him.” I would look to the nature of the statement; if it accusatory, it is testimonial. See State v. Mizenko, 127 P.3d 458 (Mt. 2006) (Nelson, J., dissenting). To do otherwise is to court absurd results as we have here. Despite the fact that JB has been determined to be incompetent to testify, her testimony was nonetheless placed in evidence through her mother in a form that could not be tested by cross-examination. If this does not violate the Confrontation Clause, nothing does. Finally, while it is certainly true that Crawford does not provide all the definitive answers and definitions that would make this case easy to analyze, it does clearly abrogate the analytical formations promulgated in Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56 (1980), which held that the Confrontation Clause would not be violated if the hearsay that was admitted “falls under a firmly rooted hearsay exception or bears particularized guarantees of trustworthiness.” (Internal punctuation omitted.) Crawford, 541 U.S. at 60. As the Crawford Court stated: [T]he Clause’s ultimate goal is to ensure the reliability of evidence, but it is a procedural rather than a substantive guarantee. It commands, not that the evidence be reliable, but that the reliability be assessed in a particular manner: by testing in the crucible of cross-examination. The Clause thus reflects a judgment, not only about the desirability of rehable evidence (a point on which there could be little dissent), but how reliability can best be determined. Even though the appellant has abandoned his arguments based on Arkansas Rule of Evidence 804(b)(7), I wish to express my concern about the rule’s constitutionality. It appears to me that while it may have passed muster under Ohio v. Roberts, supra, it does not comport with the Supreme Court’s decision in Crawford. I recommend that the bar and our supreme court examine Rule 804(b)(7). Baker, J., joins.