scotland news

On Thursday, the Supreme Court sided with a criminal defendant who said his Sixth Amendment rights were violated in a trial in which he was convicted of fatally shooting a two-year-old boy.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote View For an 8-1 pitch. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.

Hemphill v. New York involve Sixth Amendment Confrontation ClauseApplication when defendant “opens the door” to evidence without cross-examination. After the 2006 shooting death of David Pacheco Jr., New York tried Nicholas Morris for murder and possession of a firearm with an alleged murder weapon. But that trial ended in failure, and the state eventually re-charged Morris with possession of a different firearm. Morris pleaded guilty to the charge.

The state then tried Darrell Hemphill on murder charges. At Hemphill’s trial, prosecutors have repeatedly sought as evidence statements in Morris’s guilty plea, in which Morris denies possessing a suspected murder weapon — statements that were never cross-examined. The trial court first denied admission on the grounds of the adversarial clause, but ultimately found the statements admissible because the arguments advanced by Hemphill’s lawyers “opened the door” to the evidence.

The Supreme Court rejected this theory. “The confrontation clause requires that the reliability and veracity of evidence against a criminal defendant be tested by cross-examination, not by the trial court,” Sotomayor wrote. Testimony hearsay that it is necessary to correct Hemphill’s misleading arguments violates this fundamental warranty.”

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