By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau –
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court retreated Monday from its view that a criminal defendant’s right to confront his accusers requires live trial testimony from the crime lab analyst who identified him as the culprit.
By a splintered 5-4 vote, the justices upheld the conviction of a Chicago rapist who was found guilty based on a DNA match done by a crime lab in Maryland. The majority said the expert testimony provided by an Illinois police lab analyst was sufficient.
The ruling came as the court entered the last two weeks of its term. Major rulings on health care, immigration and broadcast indecency are still pending. The justices will hand down decisions on Thursday and again on several days next week.
The court’s partial retreat in Williams v. Illinois is a victory for prosecutors and state lawyers.
The Sixth Amendment says the accused “shall enjoy the right … to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” Justice Antonin Scalia had led a revival of this right and said it applied not just to the eyewitnesses to a crime, but to all persons who provide crucial testimony for the prosecution.
Three years ago, the court said that since lab reports supply crucial testimony, a technician must testify. Scalia’s opinion for a 5-4 majority overturned the conviction of a cocaine dealer because the lab technician who examined the white powder did not testify. Two years ago, the court said the same in a case of a drunken driver who disputed the blood alcohol test.
Prosecutors worried the Supreme Court was on the verge of giving defendants a right to demand testimony from all crime lab technicians whose reports were used against them. This would prove costly and take the forensic experts away from their crime labs, they said.
But the court reversed course Monday, thanks to a switch by Justice Clarence Thomas. Before, he was with Scalia. This time, he voted with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer to uphold the conviction in the Chicago rape case.
They appeared to agree that an expert’s explanation of a lab test could take the place of live testimony from the technician who did the work.
The case began in 2000 when a 22-year old woman was abducted and raped in a car. Police detectives obtained a semen sample from a hospital examination, and it was sent to a Cellmark lab in Maryland for a DNA profile. Sandy Williams was later arrested on other charges, and a blood sample was taken. A computer then matched his blood sample to the DNA profile.
At his trial, Sandra Lambatos, an expert from the Illinois state police lab, testfied and explained how the match was done. Williams was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He appealed on the grounds that he was not confronted by the DNA technicians from Maryland.
He lost on a divided vote.
“We now conclude that this form of expert testimony does not violate the Confrontation Clause,” Alito said, joined by three others. He noted lawyers for Williams could have subpoenaed the Cellmark technicians if they doubted the reliability of their work. In a separate opinion, Thomas agreed the expert’s explanation was not the kind of “hearsay” that violated a defendant’s right to confront his accusers.
The court’s split did not follow the usual ideological lines, or predictable gender ones either. Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissent joined by Justices Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, who took the side of the convicted rapist.
“Under our Confrontation Clause precedents, this is an open-and-shut case,” she wrote. Williams deserved a chance to cross-examine the DNA expert who profiled him, she said. Now, the court “has left significant confusion” over when lab experts must testify, she said.
