People v. Lopez (2012)

In People v. Lopez (2012) 55 Cal.4th 569, the criminalist who analyzed the blood sample of a defendant in a vehicular manslaughter case did not testify and the prosecution did not assert that he was unavailable. Instead, testimony was offered by the supervisor who had trained the absent criminalist and who professed to be "'intimately familiar'" with his procedures and how he tests blood for alcohol content. (Id. at p. 574.) Indeed, according to the supervisor, all of the workers in the lab were trained to process blood alcohol analyses in the same manner. (Ibid.) The testing criminalist used a gas chromatograph to analyze the blood sample and prepared a report, the critical parts of which were five pages of a computer printout generated by the gas chromatography machine indicating the sample contained a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.09 percent and a sixth page (the first page in order) that contained a notation, entered by a lab assistant, linking the defendant to the blood sample tested by the gas chromatograph. The defendant challenged the admission of the supervisor's testimony and the laboratory report prepared by the absent criminalist as a violation of his rights of confrontation. (Id. at pp. 582-584.) Our Supreme Court set forth the controlling principles: As a threshold matter, "the prosecution's use at trial of testimonial out-of-court statements ordinarily violates the defendant's right to confront the maker of the statements unless the declarant is unavailable to testify and the defendant had a prior opportunity for cross-examination." (Lopez, supra, 55 Cal.4th at p. 581.) And what is "testimonial?" The court noted the United States Supreme Court had not settled on a definition, but their decisions intimate that a testimonial statement has two "critical components:" 1) the statement must have been made with some degree of formality or solemnity, and 2) its primary purpose must pertain in some fashion to a criminal prosecution. (Lopez, supra, 55 Cal.4th at pp. 581-582.) Applying these principles, the court concluded the introduction into evidence of the machine-generated printouts shown on pages two through six did not implicate the Sixth Amendment's right to confrontation. The raw data generated by such machines are not statements and machines are not declarants as discussed in the Crawford decision. (Lopez, supra, 55 Cal.4th at p. 583.) Though the signature of the nontestifying criminalist appeared on a page containing a printout of the machine's calibrations, and though his initials appeared on the other pages, no statement by the criminalist, express or implied, appeared on any of the pages. (Ibid.)