Court Opinion

ID: 9745970
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 13:45:41.67682+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:06.930230
License: Public Domain

Smith, J. (dissenting).
I join Judge Jones’s dissent, but add my own because I think that the majority’s opinion is wrong on the constitutional issue as well as the statutory one.
Article I, § 6 of the New York State Constitution (“In any trial in any court whatever the party accused shall ... be confronted with the witnesses against him or her”) and the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution (“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right ... to be confronted with the witnesses against him”) protect the right of confrontation. (I assume here that the content of the state and federal rights is the same; I know of no authority holding otherwise.) If, as the majority holds, what happened in this case is permissible under the Criminal Procedure Law, the constitutional questions presented are whether defendant was denied her right of confrontation and if so whether there is an adequate excuse for the denial. I answer yes to the first question and no to the second.
The right of confrontation includes—indeed, is, at its core— the right to meet one’s accuser face to face (Coy v Iowa, 487 US 1012, 1016 [1988]). Neither our Court nor the United States Supreme Court has held, and I would not now hold, that a two-way-television encounter is “face to face” in this sense. The assumption underlying the constitutional right of confrontation is that a witness brought into the presence of the accused will be less likely to swear to a false accusation, or to do so convincingly (id. at 1019). The point of confrontation is thus the psychological effect it has on the witness. That effect is, beyond question, substantially diluted when, though the witness and the accused can see each other, the witness knows that the accused is far away. I therefore conclude that defendant in this case was not permitted to “confront” her accuser in the constitutional sense, and I would reject so much of United States *45v Gigante (166 F3d 75, 80-81 [2d Cir 1999]) as may be read to hold otherwise.
That conclusion does not resolve the case, because we held in People v Cintron (75 NY2d 249 [1990]) and the United States Supreme Court held in Maryland v Craig (497 US 836 [1990]) that the right of face to face confrontation is not absolute, and may be denied where “an appropriate individualized showing of necessity is made” (Cintron, 75 NY2d at 258)—or, as the Supreme Court put it, where “denial of such confrontation is necessary to further an important public policy” (Craig, 497 US at 850). But Cintron and Craig involved child victims in sexual assault cases, and presented a far more compelling case than this one for making an exception to the right of confrontation.
In Cintron and Craig, the harm to be avoided—emotional trauma to a child—would be caused by the confrontation itself; there was no way to avoid the harm except by dispensing with face to face confrontation. Here, the threatened harm is to the health of an elderly witness from the stress of travel, and there is a way to avoid that harm without depriving defendant of her confrontation right: bring the accused to the witness, instead of bringing the witness to the accused. In other words, the dilemma could be resolved by allowing the deposition or conditional examination of the complainant to be taken in California, with defendant present. It may well be that that solution is not available under New York’s statutes, but this does not affect the constitutional analysis. New York cannot deprive defendant of her constitutional right by its Legislature’s choice not to provide for a way of accommodating both that right and the witness’s legitimate interest.
Thus, while I agree with Judge Jones that the Appellate Division’s reversal of defendant’s conviction on statutory grounds—a result that has the virtue of avoiding the constitutional issue—was correct, I also believe that, if the constitutional issue is reached, we should decide it in defendant’s favor.
Judges Graffeo, Read and Pigott concur with Judge Ciparick; Judge Jones dissents and votes to affirm in a separate opinion in which Judge Smith concurs; Judge Smith dissents in another dissenting opinion; Chief Judge Lippman taking no part.
Order reversed, etc.