Court Opinion

ID: 9427595
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:21:16.933172+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:08.274131
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rehnquist,
dissenting.
The Court today takes another step toward embalming the law of evidence in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. I think it impossible to find any justification in the Constitution for today’s ruling, and take comfort only from the fact that since this is a capital case, it is perhaps an example of the maxim that “hard cases make bad law.”
The Georgia trial court refused to allow in evidence certain testimony at petitioner’s sentencing trial on the ground that it constituted inadmissible hearsay under Ga. Code § 38-301 (1978). This Court does not, and could not, dispute the propriety of that ruling. Instead, it marshals a number of ad hoc reasons why Georgia should adopt a code of evidence that would allow this particular testimony to be admitted, and concludes that “[i]n these unique circumstances, ‘the hearsay rule may not be applied mechanistically to defeat the ends of justice.’ ” Ante, at 97.
Nothing in the United States Constitution gives this Court any authority to supersede a State’s code of evidence because its application in a particular situation would defeat what this Court conceives to be “the ends of justice.” The Court does not disagree that the testimony at issue is hearsay or that it fails to come within any of the exceptions to the hearsay rule provided by Georgia’s rules of evidence. The Court obviously is troubled by the fact that the same testimony was admissible at the separate trial of petitioner’s codefendant at the behest of the State. But this fact by no means demonstrates that the Georgia courts have not evenhandedly applied their code of evidence, with its various hearsay exceptions, so as to deny *99petitioner a fair trial. No practicing lawyer can have failed to note that Georgia’s evidentiary rules, like those of every other State and of the United States, are such that certain items of evidence may be introduced by one party, but not by another. This is a fact of trial life, embodied throughout the hearsay rule and its exceptions. This being the case, the United States Constitution must be strained to or beyond the breaking point to conclude that all capital defendants who are unable to introduce all of the evidence which they seek to admit are denied a fair trial. I therefore dissent from the vacation of petitioner’s sentence.