"Agitate, agitate, agitate!" -Frederick Douglass
Not really, but one can dream.
The Supreme Court of the United States has declined to hear Paul Warner Powell’s case, so his execution should be scheduled (again) shortly.
Special thanks to commenter “Fred” for keeping me up-to-date on his case’s status at the Supreme Court in the comments section of the Paul Warner Powell page of this blog.
From Virginia Lawyers Weekly’s blog:
Paul W. Powell will not be executed tomorrow night.
U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts granted a stay of execution today pending review of his petition for a writ of certiorari to the high court.
The three-sentence order indicates that Powell shouldn’t put but so much faith in the stay, however.
If the court denies the petition, “this stay shall terminate automatically,” according to the order. If it is granted, the stay will not end until the Supreme Court decides the case, the order says.
Oh, and Bearing Drift brings up a good point: Ask Sotomayor about Paul Warner Powell
Virginia Lawyers Weekly seems to think so at their blog site:
Forensic scientists may be more frequent visitors to Virginia courtrooms as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling today that laboratory reports are testimonial evidence and therefore invoke the Confrontation Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The court split 5-4, with Justice Scalia, the author of Crawford v.Washington, the 2004 opinion that rewrote the concept of what prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys usually put in the category of hearsay testimony.
The opinion shifted the analysis from whether an out-of-court statement is reliable to whether it was “made under circumstances which would lead an objective witness reasonably to believe that the treatment would be available for use at a later trial.”
That’s the whole purpose of laboratory analysis, so Crawford clearly applies, Scalia concluded in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts.
Head on other to their site to read the whole thing.
Just think of the impact this might have on prosecutions in the state if this is actually required. Requiring a scientists to come for a DNA test for a murder is one thing, but every drug charge is (usually) accompanied by a test by the Department of Forensic Science that states that the substance the suspect is accused of processing or selling was actually a drug. I don’t know how many of this test are done every year or how many are actually used at trial but if a tech that does a 100 of those tests a day has to be in a dozen jurisdictions on the same day just to testify for the cases there are going to some major problems.