US Supreme Ct - June 18, 2015
From OCDLA Library of Defense
by: Abassos • June 19, 2015 • no comments
The New York Times
Ohio v Clark - Crawford Narrowed:
- The court unanimously ruled that prosecutors could use statements that a 3-year-old boy made to his teachers about being abused by his mother’s pimp at the man’s trial on assault, child endangerment and domestic violence charges. The defendant, Darius Clark, said the secondhand statements should not be permitted under the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause, which gives a criminal defendant the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”
- Justice Alito, writing for six justices, said the statements were not subject to the clause because they were made “in the context of an ongoing emergency involving suspected child abuse.” He wrote that “statements by very young children will rarely, if ever, implicate the confrontation clause,” adding: “Few preschool students understand the details of our criminal justice system.”
Brumfield v Cain - Atkins Solidified:
- Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the majority on Thursday, said that Mr. Brumfield’s I.Q., of 75, and his difficulties with learning and performing ordinary tasks were enough to raise reasonable doubts about his intellectual capacity. Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion.
Link to the Article: The New York Times
SCOTUSblog
Ohio v Clark - Crawford Narrowed:
- Since issuing its 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington, a major Confrontation Clause precedent barring out-of-court statements accusing someone of a crime if that person is not available to testify, the Justices had left undecided whether that ruling applies when the statements were made to someone other than police.
- In Thursday’s ruling, the Court did not give a hard-and-fast answer to that question, but it did say that there could be circumstances — and the Cleveland case presented one such scenario — in which an out-of-court statement to someone other than police could be used at trial without violating the Confrontation Clause. And, the opinion written by Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., went on to indicate that a child’s out-of-court accusations almost never would be excluded from the trial under the Crawford precedent.
Brumfield v Cain - Atkins Solidified:
- Justice Sotomayor wrote for the five-Justice majority, in an opinion that was focused almost exclusively upon the specific evidence about whether the convicted man, Kevan Brumfield, was intellectually disabled. But the opinion nevertheless was significant because it came in a case in which Louisiana state courts had used the analytical technique that the Supreme Court has endorsed for determining intellectual capacity. The majority found that the lower court had misapplied that technique in denying Brumfield a hearing on his intellectual state.
Link to the Article: SCOTUSblog
