The Sixth Amendment

This amendment relates directly to our criminal justice system and trials.  The language here is all important: speedy and public trials means that the government can't hold you in prison for years before they put you on trial and they also have to try you with open doors.  They can't keep trials secret from the general public.  Impartial juries solidify the idea that you are innocent until proven guilty.  You have to be informed of exactly what you are being charged with, and presented with witnesses against you.  The government can't put you in jail with no witnesses simply because it wants you in jail.  You also have the ability to get your own witnesses and always have the right to counsel.  Lots and lots of important rights here.  These are incredibly important when you are being accused of a crime, and every single person should know them.  These are the rights that keep our court system from abusing its power.  Learn them and never forget them!

Video



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While a somewhat short video, this is a clear violation of the right to an impartial jury.  This video makes me wonder how often an event exactly like this occurs inside the courtroom.  The problem is, how do you keep this from actually happening?  As a person accused of a crime, you have no control over how your jury is chosen.  Definitely some food for thought about the justice system

Article

Court Upholds Sixth Amendment Rights 

By ANNE GEARAN
The Associated Press
Monday, March 8, 2004; 1:33 PM

WASHINGTON - The Constitution guarantees a criminal defendant may confront his accusers, and that right means prosecutors can't use a wife's taped statement to police to try to undermine her husband at trial, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The high court sided with a man convicted of assaulting an acquaintance he had accused of trying to rape his wife. Sylvia Crawford did not testify at Michael Crawford's trial, but prosecutors played a tape they claimed showed her story did not match his.

Michael Crawford's lawyers had no opportunity to cross-examine Sylvia Crawford about the tape, a unanimous Supreme Court said.

"That alone is sufficient to make out a violation of the Sixth Amendment," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees that "in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right ... to be confronted with the witnesses against him."

All nine justices agreed to throw out Michael Crawford's conviction and return the case to the state court system in Washington. Seven justices also took the unusual step of squarely overruling an earlier case that laid out complex rules for when statements can be used without the opportunity for cross-examination.

The 1980 case has needlessly complicated a fairly straightforward part of the Constitution, Scalia wrote. The Constitution's framers were wary of letting judges have too much power, he added.

"By replacing categorical constitutional guarantees with open-ended balancing tests, we do violence to their design. Vague standards are manipulable," Scalia wrote.

While that "might be a small concern in run-of-the-mill assault prosecutions like this one," the framers had in mind the darker specter of state trials such as Sir Walter Raleigh's in 17th Century England, Scalia wrote.

Raleigh demanded that the judges "call my accuser before my face," but they refused. Raleigh was sentenced to death for treason.

Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony M. Kennedy, David Souter, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer agreed with him.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor dissented from the portion of the ruling that overturned the earlier case, and said the majority was complicating, not clarifying, the rules prosecutors should follow.

"The thousands of federal prosecutors and the tens of thousands of state prosecutors need answers as to what beyond the specific kinds of 'testimony' the court lists is covered by the new rule," Rehnquist wrote.

The Crawford case began in 1999, when Crawford and his wife went to find Kenneth Lee at his apartment in Olympia, Wash. The two men argued and fought, and Sylvia Crawford saw what happened. Michael Crawford got a cut on his hand that required 12 stitches to close, and he stabbed Lee in the stomach, seriously wounding him.

The Crawfords fled the apartment and were arrested that night. They both gave statements to police, but only Michael Crawford said he thought he had seen Lee reach for a weapon before he was stabbed.

Sylvia did not testify at her husband's trial because of the law protecting spouses from testifying against one another. Prosecutors used her statement to refute his claim that the stabbing was self-defense. In a closing statement to jurors, a prosecutor called the statement "damning evidence."

The case is Crawford v. Washington, 02-9410.

© 2004 The Associated Press

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This case shows how prosecutors can and will try nearly anything to get the conviction they're looking for.  Since there is a law protecting spouses from testifying against one another, the wife could not be confronted as a witness or cross examined, but the prosecution still tried to use a tape of her testimony in court despite that.  Thankfully, the court saw through this and overturned the decision as wrongful.  I really liked how Scalia referred back to the framer's intent with this amendment.  They weren't necessarily concerned with small cases (though it does apply), but rather with cases like Sir Walter Raleigh's, where he was denied witnesses and simply put to death.