Tara R. Price has posted ‘Bull’ Coming from the States: Why the Supreme Court Should Use Williams v. Illinois to Close One of Bullcoming’s Confrontation Clause Loopholes (Florida State University Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Numerous juries have convicted defendants based on second-hand (or hearsay) expert witness testimony about laboratory reports performed and certified by other analysts who never appeared at trial.
On June 23, 2011, however, the Supreme Court put this practice to a stop in Bullcoming v. New Mexico. Or did it? In perhaps the closest majority in recent Confrontation Clause history, the Supreme Court affirmed that the protections of the Sixth Amendment extend to the admission of scientific evidence against a defendant, so long as the evidence consists of a written report admitted at trial.
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