Court Opinion

ID: 9637145
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 14:58:47.241287+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:04:56.293431
License: Public Domain

DUGGAN, J.,
dissenting. The majority’s thoughtful opinion is one of the best efforts a court has made to harmonize recent United States Supreme Court cases concerning the Confrontation Clause, the realities of criminal trial practice and state statutory provisions. However, because I believe *141that Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), requires a different result, I respectfully dissent.
The United States Supreme Court’s decision in Crawford effectuated a major change in how alleged violations of the Federal Confrontation Clause must be analyzed. See State v. Ayer, 154 N.H. 500, 504-05 (2006), petition for cert. filed (U.S. Apr. 26, 2007) (No. 06-11028). Before Crawford, we applied the standard announced in Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56 (1980), making a basic foundational inquiry into the reliability of the evidence. Under Roberts, evidence was considered to have “adequate ’indicia of reliability’” if it fell “within a firmly rooted hearsay exception,” or possessed “particularized guarantees of trustworthiness.” Roberts, 448 U.S. at 66; Ayer, 154 N.H. at 505.
In Cranford, the United States Supreme Court eliminated reliability as the foundation upon which Confrontation Clause analyses rest, explaining:
Where testimonial statements are involved, we do not think the Framers meant to leave the Sixth Amendment’s protection to the vagaries of the rules of evidence, much less to amorphous notions of “reliability.” ... Admitting statements deemed reliable by a judge is fundamentally at odds with the right of confrontation. To be sure, the Clause’s ultimate goal is to ensure reliability of evidence, but it is a procedural rather than a substantive guarantee. It commands, not that evidence be reliable, but that reliability be assessed in a particular manner: by testing in the crucible of cross-examination____
Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty. This is not what the Sixth Amendment prescribes.
Crawford, 541 U.S. at 61-62. Thus, the Court held that the Confrontation Clause bars the admission of “testimonial statements of a declarant absent from trial [unless] ... the declarant is unavailable and the defendant has had a prior opportunity to cross-examine the declarant.” Ayer, 154 N.H. at 505; Crawford, 541 U.S. at 59; Davis v. Washington, 126 S. Ct. 2266, 2275 n.4 (2006). “This ruling effected a sea change in the jurisprudence of the Confrontation Clause — but the Court left open the parameters of [what would constitute] testimonial hearsay, and so its ruling produced a miasma of uncertainty.” United States v. Brito, 427 F.3d 53, 55 (1st Cir. 2005), cert. denied, 126 S. Ct. 2983 (2006).
*142The principal question presented by this case is whether a blood collection form and blood test result are “testimonial” within the meaning of Cranford. In answering this question, the majority carefully summarizes Federal Supreme Court jurisprudence, including Crawford, Davis and Roberts, and discusses how other courts have dealt with this question.
I agree with the majority’s well-reasoned discussion of why efforts to apply the business records exception in the Confrontation Clause context must be rejected as inconsistent with Crawford. Courts applying the business records exception seize upon dicta from Crawford, in which the Court noted that at the time the Framers drafted the Federal Constitution, “[m]ost of the hearsay exceptions covered statements that by their nature were not testimonial — for example, business records or statements in furtherance of a conspiracy.” Crawford, 541 U.S. at 56. However, even under the historical approach taken in Crawford, it does not necessarily follow from this dictum that reports like the ones at issue in this case ought to be deemed nontestimonial business records. Business records are not considered “testimonial” because they are prepared for business — not prosecutorial — purposes. Here, by contrast, the records at issue were prepared solely for prosecutorial purposes.
Indeed, at least two courts have exhaustively traced the history of the business records exception from 1791 through modern times. See Thomas v. United States, 914 A.2d 1, 13-14 (D.C. 2006), petition for cert. filed (U.S. June 28, 2007) (No. 07-5053); State v. Miller, 144 P.3d 1052, 105860 (Or. Ct. App.), adhered to on reconsideration, 149 P.3d 1251 (Or. Ct. App. 2006). Based upon their thorough reviews of the history of the business records exception, both courts persuasively concluded that the Framers would not have considered reports like those at issue here to be nontestimonial business records. Thomas, 914 A.2d at 14; Miller, 144 P.3d at 1060. For example, the Thomas Court concluded:
As an historical matter, the exception in 1791 was a very narrow one. See generally 5 John Henry Wigmore, Evidence in Trials at Common Law, §§ 1518-19 (1974 ed.). In Cranford, the Supreme Court found no evidence that the historical business records exception (or any other historical exception apart from that for dying declarations) ever had been “invoked to admit testimonial statements against the accused in a criminal case,” nor any indication that the Framers thought it could be so used. 541 U.S. at 56, 124 S.Ct. 1354 (emphasis in original). Traditionally, the historical business records exception did not encompass records prepared for use in litigation, let alone *143records produced ex parte by government agents for later use in criminal prosecutions. See, e.g., United States v. Smith, 172 U.S. App. D.C. 297, 306, 521 F.2d 957, 966 (1975) (discussing the generally accepted “litigation records” doctrine that would “deny the business records exception to any document prepared with an eye toward litigation when offered by the party responsible for making the record.”).
Thomas, 914 A.2d at 13.
I find the historical approach and conclusions reached in Thomas and Miller to be persuasive, especially because the reports at issue were prepared in anticipation of trial and at the request of police officials. The
[i]nvolvement of government officers in the production of testimony with an eye toward trial presents unique potential for prosecutorial abuse — a fact borne out time and again throughout a history with which the Framers were keenly familiar. This consideration does not evaporate when testimony happens to fall within some broad, modern hearsay exception, even if that exception might be justifiable in other circumstances.
Crawford, 541 U.S. at 56-57 n.7. Thus, as the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reasoned, “where a document is created primarily for the government to use ... as a substitute for live testimony in a criminal prosecution, the fact that the document might happen to fall within the jurisdiction’s business records exception to the hearsay rule does not render the document non-testimonial.” Thomas, 914 A.2d at 14; see also Johnson v. State, 929 So. 2d 4, 7 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2005), review granted, 924 So. 2d 810 (Fla. 2006).
After summarizing the legal landscape, the majority announces and applies a three-part test that focuses upon whether the statement at issue: (1) documents past events (as opposed to being a contemporaneous recordation of observable events); (2) was prepared in a manner resembling ex parte examination; and (3) is an accusation. Affirmative answers to these questions indicate that a statement is testimonial.
As a theoretical matter, the test set forth in the majority’s opinion admirably leaves some room for a trial court to evaluate each piece of evidence in context to determine whether it is testimonial. However, the first and last prongs of the test focus upon the content of the statements at issue, i.e., the time frame they describe and whether they are accusatory in nature. Crawford’s core class of testimonial statements, on the other hand, focuses not upon the content of the statements, but upon the process through which the statements were made. Crawford, 541 U.S. at 51-52.
*144Further, reduced to their essence, the three prongs of the test appear to constitute a means of making an initial or threshold reliability assessment and thus concluding that cross-examination would be of little value. For example, one reason that the contemporaneous recordation of observable events is a hearsay exception (a present sense impression), is that such a statement is deemed inherently more reliable than a recitation of past events. See Simpkins v. Snow, 139 N.H. 735, 738 (1995); N.H. R. Ev. 803 Reporter’s Notes. Likewise, accusations are not inherently reliable because they amount to one person’s claim that another has perpetrated some act. Evaluating accusations often requires the assessment of demeanor and other credibility determinations that can only be made during live testimony.
Although the Confrontation Clause’s “ultimate goal is to ensure reliability of evidence,” Crawford makes clear that “[w]here testimonial statements are involved,... the Framers [did not intend] to leave the Sixth Amendment’s protection to the vagaries of the rules of evidence, much less to amorphous notions of ‘reliability.’ ... Admitting statements deemed reliable by a judge is fundamentally at odds with the right of confrontation.” Crawford, 541 U.S. at 61. Thus, nothing in Crawford suggests that because cross-examination concerning a particular statement may be of little value, the requirements of the Confrontation Clause are satisfied. Accordingly, while I find the majority’s test to be balanced, I think Crawford severely constrains our analysis and forbids us from adopting it. Crawford simply does not seem to allow us to make preliminary reliability assessments to determine whether the right of confrontation applies. See Crawford, 541 U.S. at 61 (the Confrontation Clause “commands, not that evidence be reliable, but that reliability be assessed in a particular manner: by testing in the crucible of cross-examination”).
In terms of applying the three-prong test, there are some open questions. Three examples are illustrative. First, under the test, it appears that in a first degree or capital murder trial, identification or cause of death may be established through the affidavit of, for example, a DNA analyst who does not testify. Indeed that appears to be the result in People v. Geier, 161 P.3d 104 (Cal. 2007), which announced a reformulation of Crawford similar to the majority’s. I simply do not agree that the Confrontation Clause allows the State to use the affidavits of its agents to prove a DNA match in a death penalty case. Second, asking whether a statement is an accusation may produce some odd results because many calls to the police are accusatory, including the 911 call at issue in Davis. Finally, emphasizing temporal concerns also leaves open the door for some interesting debate. For instance, with respect to an autopsy report, one *145could argue that the pathologist is simply recording what he or she is presently seeing as the test’s result for a given subject; however, one could just as easily argue that the pathologist is actually recording the subject’s physical state or cause of death from a given day in the past.
Thus, like the Missouri and Minnesota Supreme Courts, see State v. March, 216 S.W.3d 663, 666 (Mo. 2007); State v. Caulfield, 722 N.W.2d 304, 310 (Minn. 2006), I believe that the United States Supreme Court’s decision to “leave for another day any effort to spell out a comprehensive definition of‘testimonial,’” Crawford, 541 U.S. at 68, requires us to adhere to the three “formulations of [a] core class of testimonial statements” announced in Crawford,:
ex paHe 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.
Id. at 51-52 (quotations and citations omitted). We must also be mindful that, in Davis, the Court held that statements are also testimonial when made in response to police interrogation, when “the primary purpose of the interrogation is to establish or prove past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution.” Ayer, 154 N.H. at 507 (quotation omitted).
If we apply these principles to the blood test result, it satisfies two of the three “core” criteria articulated in Crawford. Crawford, 541 U.S. at 51-52. It is an ex parte affidavit about which Dr. Wagner testified. State v. Coombs, 149 N.H. 319, 322 (2003) (“A laboratory test used to prove an essential element of a criminal offense constitutes ... an ex parte affidavit.”); March, 216 S.W.3d at 666 (“A laboratory report... that was prepared solely for prosecution to prove an element of the crime charged is ‘testimonial’ because it bears all the characteristics of an ex parte affidavit.”). In that capacity, it functioned as the equivalent of testimony for purposes of establishing the defendant’s blood alcohol content.
While lab reports are not testimony as it is generally imagined ..., they are nonetheless statements of a fact relevant to the case as the speaker perceives it. Were the preparer of a lab report to state his or her findings in court, then the spoken contents of the *146report would qualify as testimony. Therefore, it makes little sense to say that the same statement cannot be testimony merely because it is offered in the form of a report. In any event, Crawford made no indication that whether a statement is testimonial depends upon its format; instead, it merely defined testimony as “[a] solemn declaration or affirmation made for the purpose of establishing or proving some fact,” a criterion most lab reports would have no trouble meeting.
Note, Testimonial or Nontestimonial? The Admissibility of Forensic Evidence after Crawford v. Washington, 94 Ky. L.J. 187, 203 (2005). Equally important, the analyst performed the test at the request of the police, and she should reasonably have believed that the results she reported would be used by the prosecution to secure a conviction at a subsequent trial for DWI. Thus, since use of ex parte affidavits to secure criminal convictions was “the principal evil at which the Confrontation Clause was directed,” Crawford compels a conclusion that the blood test result was “testimonial.” Crawford, 541 U.S. at 50.
A significant, and growing, number of courts from around the country have reached the same conclusion. See State v. Birchfield, 157 P.3d 216, 220 (Or. 2007) (deciding issue under Oregon Constitution); March, 216 S.W.3d at 667 (deciding under Crawford that laboratory report identifying substance as cocaine was testimonial); Miller, 144 P.3d at 1060 (deciding under Crawford that laboratory test result concluding urine and pipe residue contained methamphetamine was testimonial); Thomas, 914 A.2d at 12 (deciding under Crawford that laboratory test identifying substance as cocaine was testimonial); Caulfield, 722 N.W.2d at 310 (deciding under Crawford that laboratory test result identifying substance as cocaine was testimonial); State v. Campbell, 719 N.W.2d 374, 377 (N.D. 2006) (assuming report from crime lab identifying substance as marijuana was testimonial), cert. denied, 127 S. Ct. 1150 (2007); United States v. Rahamin, 168 Fed. Appx. 512, 520 (3d Cir. 2006) (recognizing that a DEA laboratory report appeared to be a testimonial statement since it was offered to prove the weight and substance of ecstasy pills); City of Las Vegas v. Walsh, 124 P.3d 203, 207-08 (Nev. 2005) (deciding under Crawford that nurse’s affidavit describing procedure used to draw blood was testimonial), cert. denied, 547 U.S. 1071 (2006); Belvin v. State, 922 So. 2d 1046, 1054 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2005) (deciding under Crawford that portions of breath test affidavit were testimonial), review granted, 928 So. 2d 336 (Fla. 2006); Johnson, 929 So. 2d at 8 (deciding under Crawford that laboratory report identifying substances as cocaine and marijuana was testimonial); State v. Crager, 844 N.E.2d 390, 396 (Ohio Ct. App. 2005) (deciding under *147Crawford that DNA analyst’s report was testimonial), appeal allowed, 846 N.E.2d 533 (Ohio 2006); People v. Rogers, 780 N.Y.S.2d 393, 396-97 (App. Div. 2004) (deciding under Crawford that admission of blood test results violated Confrontation Clause); People v. Lonsby, 707 N.W.2d 610, 620-21 (Mich. Ct. App. 2005) (deciding under Crawford that information from lab report intimating that substance on defendant’s shorts was semen was testimonial and inadmissible), appeal denied, 720 N.W.2d 742 (Mich. 2006); State v. Berezansky, 899 A.2d 306, 312 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 2006) (deciding under Crawford that laboratory certifícate indicating sample of defendant’s blood contained a blood-alcohol level of .33 percent was a testimonial statement because the report was not a record prepared or maintained in the ordinary course of government business, but was prepared in order to prove an element of the crime and offered in lieu of producing the qualified individual who actually performed the test), cert. granted, 923 A.2d 231 (N.J. 2007).
Some of the foregoing cases involved reports based upon tests other than blood alcohol analysis — for example, DNA testing, autopsies and breath tests. The courts in many of these cases cited each other as persuasive authority to support their reasoning. By so doing, these courts have correctly recognized that there is no principled way to distinguish among these tests or reports for purposes of Crawford.
The same is true of the blood collection form. In State v. Renshaw, 915 A.2d 1081, 1087 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 2007), the court determined that a hospital nurse’s blood sample certification, completed pursuant to a New Jersey statute, was testimonial under Crawford. There, as here, a private hospital employee was asked by a police officer to draw a blood sample from a suspected drunk driver. Id. at 1083. The employee did so, using a kit provided by the officer. Id. The employee then gave two vials of extracted blood to the officer, along with a blood collection form akin to the one at issue here. Id. at 1084. The court concluded that the collection form was “prepared for purposes of trial, and indeed only for purposes of trial, [and could be considered] nothing other than testimonial.” Id. at 1087; see also State v. Kent, 918 A.2d 626, 637-38 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 2007) (reaffirming Renshaw and holding that the primary purpose of the certificate “was surely to preserve evidence for a future anticipated DWI prosecution”).
Thus, like the blood test result, the blood collection form was testimonial within the meaning of Cranford. It constituted an extrajudicial affidavit being offered to prove or establish the procedures followed during blood collection. Moreover, the blood collection form at issue here was prepared at the request of the police, and its sole intended use was to secure a conviction at trial.
*148Before concluding, I note that this case is decided under the Federal Constitution. State constitutional issues remain open as do issues involving whether we may, in the exercise of our supervisory power, require live testimony at trial under certain circumstances.
Finally, I recognize that if my view were adopted, it would be of no slight consequence for the prosecution of certain offenses in this state and for expert witnesses. However, until the United States Supreme Court modifies or clarifies Crawford, or charts a different course, I, like the courts whose opinions are cited above, believe we are compelled to follow Crawford and to apply its reasoning to the hearsay statements currently before us. Thus, I would reverse the defendant’s conviction and remand for further proceedings.
BRODERICK, C.J., joins in the dissent.