Ohio v. Roberts

In Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56 (1980), the court found the prosecution used good faith to find a witness who departed the jurisdiction soon after testifying at the preliminary hearing. Her parents informed the prosecutor that they had heard from her only once in the prior year, she was traveling outside the state, she did not disclose her whereabouts, but a social worker reported the witness filed a welfare application in San Francisco. The prosecutor issued subpoenas for the witness at her parents' home on five occasions over a period of several months. (Roberts, supra, at pp. 59-60.) Roberts held the prosecution established the witness's unavailability. While the prosecutor might have tried to locate the San Francisco social worker, Roberts held that "one, in hindsight, may always think of other things. Nevertheless, the great improbability that such efforts would have resulted in locating the witness ... neutralizes any intimation that a concept of reasonableness required their execution." (Id. at pp. 75-76.) The United States Supreme Court identified two values underlying the Confrontation Clause: (1) the Framers' preference for face-to-face accusation; (2) the reliability of the hearsay statement. Id. at 65-66. In furtherance of these values, the court held that the party offering the hearsay evidence had to show that the declarant is "unavailable" and that the statement bears adequate "indicia of reliability." Id. at 66. The reliability requirement may be met by showing that the statement falls within a "firmly rooted hearsay exception," which renders it presumptively reliable, or that it possesses "particularized guarantees of trustworthiness." Id. at 66. The United States Supreme Court set forth an approach for determining when potentially incriminating statements, admissible under an exception to the hearsay rule, also meet the requirements of the Confrontation Clause. If the statement falls within a firmly rooted hearsay exception, reliability can be inferred. If, however, the statement does not fit within a firmly rooted hearsay exception, the statement is presumed inadmissible, and that presumption can only be overcome by a showing of particularized guarantees of trustworthiness. Roberts, 448 U.S. at 66.