Giles v. California
The Court ruled that a defendant only loses his constitutional right to confront a witness against him if he deliberately caused that witness's absence in order to keep her from testifying — not simply because he committed a crime, even murder, that happened to make her unavailable.
Because California's courts had allowed the murder victim's unconfronted statements into evidence without ever asking whether the defendant killed her specifically to silence her, the Court sent the case back so that question could be considered under the correct legal standard.
“We decline to approve an exception to the Confrontation Clause unheard of at the time of the founding or for 200 years thereafter.”
The Court's closing statement rejecting a broad forfeiture-by-wrongdoing exception.
How it got here: A California jury convicted Giles; state appellate courts upheld admission of the victim's unconfronted statements under a forfeiture theory, and the Supreme Court agreed to review that ruling.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Dwayne Giles shot and killed his ex-girlfriend, Brenda Avie, outside his grandmother's house. At his murder trial, prosecutors introduced statements Avie had made to a police officer weeks earlier describing an assault by Giles, even though Giles never had a chance to cross-examine her about those statements. Giles claimed he shot Avie in self-defense after she threatened him and charged at him.
The question before the Court
Could a murder trial use a domestic-violence victim's earlier, un-cross-examined statements to police against the man accused of killing her, just because the judge found he had committed the murder?
Why it matters
Prosecutors in domestic violence and other cases where the alleged victim has died can no longer automatically use her prior statements to police just because the defendant caused her absence. They must instead show the defendant acted specifically to prevent her from testifying, which changes how these often-difficult cases are investigated, argued, and proven at trial.
What changes now
The case returns to the California courts, which must now decide whether Giles killed Avie with the intent, at least in part, of preventing her from testifying or cooperating with authorities against him. If the evidence shows that intent \u2014 for example, from a pattern of abuse meant to isolate her from outside help \u2014 her prior statements could still be admitted under the forfeiture doctrine. This is a final merits ruling on the legal standard, not a resolution of the underlying facts.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Avie's statements to the police were "testimonial" in the first place, since that issue wasn't disputed by the parties. It also left open, on remand, whether Giles actually did intend to prevent Avie from testifying, and suggested that evidence of an ongoing pattern of abuse could support finding that intent.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas argued separately that Avie's statements to the police were not "testimonial" at all, comparing them to statements he had found nontestimonial in a companion case, because the police questioning here was informal, not custodial, and not aimed at building a case for trial. Since neither party raised that issue, he joined the majority's forfeiture analysis.
Concurrence — Justice Alito
Justice Alito likewise doubted that Avie's statement counted as the kind of "testimony" the Confrontation Clause covers, suggesting the real problem in the case was the scope of the confrontation right rather than the forfeiture rule. Since that question wasn't before the Court, he assumed the statement was covered and agreed with the majority's forfeiture analysis.
Concurrence in part — Justice Souter
Justice Souter, joined by Justice Ginsburg, agreed with the Court's historical analysis but declined to join Part II-D-2, and rested his agreement more on fairness principles than historical examples. He reasoned that requiring intent to prevent testimony avoids a circular result where guilt of the underlying crime would effectively decide admissibility, and concluded that in classic abusive relationships, intent to silence the victim can normally be inferred.
Dissent — Justice Breyer
“To the extent that it insists upon an additional showing of purpose, the Court breaks the promise implicit in those words and, in doing so, grants the defendant not fair treatment, but a windfall.”The dissent's objection that requiring proof of purpose lets killers benefit from silencing witnesses.
Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Stevens and Kennedy, argued that forfeiture should apply whenever a defendant's wrongdoing caused a witness's unavailability and he knew that would be the result, not only when preventing testimony was his specific purpose. He warned that a purpose requirement is nearly impossible to prove, creates arbitrary distinctions, and would let killers benefit from silencing witnesses they knew would not survive to testify.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court asked whether the Confrontation Clause, which normally requires defendants get a chance to cross-examine witnesses against them, has a founding-era exception for cases where the defendant's own wrongdoing caused the witness to be unavailable — known as forfeiture by wrongdoing.
- Examining historical English and early American cases, the Court found that this forfeiture exception was consistently applied only when a defendant acted with the specific purpose of preventing a witness from testifying, such as bribing, threatening, or otherwise silencing them.
- The Court found that in ordinary murder cases — even ones with overwhelming evidence the defendant killed the victim — courts never treated the killing itself as forfeiting confrontation rights unless the killing was shown to be aimed at stopping the victim's testimony; unconfronted statements were instead excluded unless they qualified as dying declarations.
- The Court concluded that treating any crime causing a witness's unavailability as an automatic forfeiture would let judges effectively decide a defendant's guilt before trial, undermining the right to a jury trial, so it declined to adopt that broader reading.
- Applying this purpose-based rule, the Court held that because the California courts admitted Avie's statements without ever considering whether Giles killed her specifically to prevent her from testifying, their forfeiture analysis was legally incorrect.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Reynolds v. United States (98 U.S. 145)
The Court relies on this 1879 case as adopting the common-law forfeiture rule limited to purposeful witness tampering.
Reaffirms Crawford v. Washington (541 U.S. 36)
The Court applies Crawford's rule that only founding-era confrontation exceptions survive today.