People v. Rawlins

In People v. Rawlins (10 NY3d 136, 884 NE2d 1019, 855 NYS2d 20 (2008)), a certificate prepared by a fingerprint examiner employed by the police department was admitted at trial in lieu of his actual testimony. The examiner's certificate contained the results of his comparison of latent fingerprints collected from a crime scene with the defendant's fingerprints. The examiner concluded that the crime scene fingerprints matched those of the defendant. The Court of Appeals found the certificate of the fingerprint examiner was testimonial in nature. The examiner had prepared the fingerprint comparison report with the expectation that it would be used in a criminal prosecution, and its use at trial constituted a substitute for his testimonial conclusions. (Id.at 157.) The Court considered whether fingerprint comparison reports and the report of a DNA technician were "testimonial" evidence under Crawford v. Washington (541 US 36, 124 S Ct 1354, 158 L Ed 2d 177 2004). In Rawlins, the Court refused to establish an "absolute rule" that documents within the "business records" exception to the hearsay rule are never testimonial, noting that under New York law records of law enforcement agencies may be business records (10 NY3d at 149-150). Instead, we discussed "various indicia of testimoniality" (id. at 151). Among them are: the extent to which the entity conducting the procedure is "an 'arm' of law enforcement" (State v. Crager, 116 Ohio St 3d 369, 379, 2007 Ohio 6840, 879 NE2d 745, 753 2007 quoted in Rawlins, 10 NY3d at 153); whether the contents of the report are a contemporaneous record of objective facts, or reflect the exercise of "fallible human judgment" (10 NY3d at 154); the question--closely related to the previous two--of whether a pro-law-enforcement bias is likely to influence the contents of the report (id. at 153); and whether the report's contents are "directly accusatory" in the sense that they explicitly link the defendant to the crime (id. at 156).