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Davis v. Washington: Confrontation Wins the Day

The Champion

In this article, Timothy O'Toole and Catharine Easterly examine the Supreme Court’s decision in Davis v. Washington, concluding that after decades of marginalization, the right to confrontation has been revived. To be sure, questions remain about the precise parameters of the right to confrontation. But by categorizing as testimonial all post-crime reports of criminal activity, limiting nontestimonial statements to law enforcement officers to those that are emergency-resolving, and rejecting the multiple formalistic tests for testimonial statements endorsed by lower courts after Crawford, the Court in Davis has reaffirmed that the confrontation guarantee is an essential component of our adversarial system that may not be easily disregarded.