I'm sure you'll all be relieved to hear that the sovereign State of Washington has determined that a dog is not a hearsay declarant for purposes of the Confrontation Clause and Crawford v. Washington .In this case from the Washington Court of Appeals, the court found that the defendant was not deprived of his right to confront his accuser when the trial court admitted testimony from the dog's handler that the dog tracked the scent of the defendant from the scene of a burglary to the point in some nearby woods where the defendant was hiding. The appellant had argued that the dog was the actual witness.
I can only imagine the cross-examination that we will now miss out on:
Q. - "Isn't it true that you once mistakenly alerted on a Purina jerky strip?"
A. - "Woof."
Q. - "No further questions."
1 comment:
This is nothing special. However, it still remains an open question as to the extend to which one can inquire into the methods by which the dog was trained, and the expertise of the dog handler. Indeed, even though, in many jurisdictions, the dog handler’s testimony is required to admit dog-sniffs, I think that there probably needs to be more veterinary testimony of just how a dog works (e.g. why his nose is more sensitive than a person’s nose) for admission under Daubert. (But this, of course, isn’t a constitutional issue.)
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