Lying To Make Friends

While the headline today is Ricci, where the Court made great strides in quelling the tide of discrimination against white men (it’s a hard knock life for white guys in Connecticut!), I thought I would take a moment to call your attention to a case that barely made the news. On Friday the Court decided Melendez-Diaz, which will have a major impact on trial practice. Take it from the esteemed Paul Bergman of the UCLA School of Law:

The Scalia-led majority held that the 6th Amend. Confrontation Clause was violated by the prosecution’s offering into evidence a lab technician’s “certificate” attesting to the fact that a substance was cocaine in lieu of calling the tech as a witness.

DA offices are calling the decision a train wreck. Since government testing labs are way behind on their testing already, the delays will inevitably get a lot worse if the lab techs who do the tests have to spend a lot of time in courthouses waiting to testify. Especially in less-populated states where one or two labs may do testing for the entire state, and especially when substances are sent to FBI labs in Wash. DC for analysis, the financial ramifications may put prosecutions as far out of reach for the government as Bentley cars are for law professors.

-AS