Summary
Unanimous U. S. Supreme Court decision to reinstate an Ohio child abuser’s conviction. The Ohio Supreme Court had held that allowing the teachers who discovered the victim’s injuries to testify about what the child told them violated the criminal’s constitutional right to confront the witnesses against him. The case involved the 2010 conviction of Darius Clark for the beating of his girlfriend’s three-year-old son and two-year-old daughter. When preschool teachers noticed bruises on the little boy’s face, they asked him who hurt him. When he responded that Clark had hit him, they reported the incident to child protective services who located the boy and his sister and took them to a hospital where other injuries to both children were discovered. On appeal, Clark won a decision announcing that the testimony of the teachers at this trial was unconstitutional. When the state appealed that ruling, CJLF joined the case to argue that a statement made to a first responder, whether a policeman or someone else, is not the same as a statement taken by an investigator building a case against a known suspect. The statement to the investigator is “testimonial” as that term is used by the Supreme Court, and the statement to the first responder, or in this case, a teacher, is not. The Supreme Court’s decision agreed.
