In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to …be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation….
–Amendment VI
The Constitution requires that an accused criminal defendant be informed of the nature of the charges against him. As Justice Hugo L. Black has written:
No principle of procedural due process is more clearly established than that notice of the specific charge, and a chance to be heard in a trial of the issues raised by that charge, if desired, are among the constitutional rights of every accused in a criminal proceeding in all courts, state or federal. Cole v. Arkansas (1948).
Initially, the function of the constitutional requirement was to provide the accused with adequate notice of the charges against him so that he could prepare a defense. As the concept of double jeopardy developed, the notice requirement came to serve the secondary purpose of allowing the accused to plead a prior acquittal as a bar to a second prosecution for the “same offense.” It also came to serve as a means of informing the court of the nature of the charges so that the court might determine their legal sufficiency.
“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to… be confronted with the witnesses against him….”
–Amendment VI
The Confrontation Clause guarantees an essential element of the adversarial trial process. The clause envisions a trial where the accused sees and hears prosecution witnesses testify in person, in open court, in his presence, and subject to cross-examination.
As the Supreme Court declared in its first major Confrontation Clause opinion, “The primary object of [the clause] was to prevent depositions or ex parte affidavits, such as were sometimes admitted in civil cases, being used against the prisoner in lieu of a personal examination and cross-examination of the witness.” Mattox v. United States (1895).
In sum, the Confrontation Clause prescribes an adversarial trial process that is designed to get at the truth by allowing defendants to challenge prosecution witnesses through face-to-face testimony and cross-examination. In order to accommodate some hearsay, and to allow for extraordinary cases where witnesses are incapable of testifying in the normal court setting, the Court has allowed exceptions to the basic rule, but only where the Court finds the resulting evidence sufficiently “reliable” in the absence of confrontation.
(OPINION: So, once again, the law says exactly what is says it is… unless the court decides that it doesn’t!)
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