Tennessee Criminal Lawyer Blog

Cases that deal with constitutional rights are often some of the most difficult to analyze and thus often find their way to the highest courts. As such, it is no surprise that a case dealing with a defendant’s constitutional right to confrontation would make its way to the Supreme Court in a case on its upcoming docket styled State v. Franklin, especially considering that what is at stake may be a prison sentence in excess of a decade. To quickly summarize the constitutional right at issue in this case it is sufficient to say that when a witness offers important testimony or evidence against a defendant in a criminal case, that defendant has a constitutional right to confront the witness. This does not mean that the defendant gets to personally confront the witness like the witness said something about the defendant’s mother, but rather that the defendant gets the opportunity to cross-examine the witness at trial rather than just having to accept the damaging testimony or evidence without further questioning.

In the case detailed above, the state introduced testimony from a gas station clerk stating that after the gas station had been robbed, the clerk had went to a nearby witness and asked him to write down the license plate number of the van he had seen the suspect drive away in. The clerk then testified to the license plate number she had seen the witness write on the piece of paper. This raised an obvious confrontation issue because the defendant would thus have been forced to accept the facts that the witness had seen the defendant get into the van and had seen the license plate number of that van accurately without being availed of any opportunity to cross-examine the witness to see if he or she was actually in a position to see the license plate, was able to see well enough to make out the license plate from that distance, etc. The trial court allowed the testimony, but it was overruled by the intermediate appellate court. The Tennessee Supreme Court will now have to decide which one of those courts made the correct holding.

Source: State v. Franklin, 34 TAM 5-23 (Tenn.Cr.App. 2009), appeal granted 6/15/09, oral argument 2/12/10.