Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Recent SCOTUS filing

Heather Cessna and I recently filed a cert petition in State v. Blanchette, a COA case holding that face-to-face Confrontation can be dispensed with under certain circumstances involving child witnesses. The COA held that the issue is governed by Maryland v. Craig, 497 U.S. 836 (1990), in which the SCOUTS did uphold such a statute by a 5-4 majority. We argued (both at the COA and now at the SCOTUS) that Maryland v. Craig was overruled by Crawford v. Washington. As Heather pointed out, if you read Scalia's dissent in Craig, it really reads like the Crawford majority opinion--the reasoning of the Craig majority is really based on Ohio v. Roberts, which is dead after Crawford. We'll keep you update in case the unlikely happens.

[Update: the SCOTUS denied the cert petition on February 20, 2007. Too bad, this will be a recurring issue]

1 comment:

Heather said...

Thanks for working on that cert petition, Randall! Hope you are ready for another DC trip because we are right on this one! ;-)