The NC Supreme Court’s Recent Substitute Analyst Cases

If you’re on my listserv, you know that the NC Supreme Court recently issued several confrontation clause decisions, all dealing with substitute analysts (if you’re not on my listserv, you can sign up here for my case summaries). I’ve previously written (here) about Williams v. Illinois, the US Supreme Court’s most recent confrontation decision on substitute analyst testimony. Because Williams was a fractured opinion in which no rationale garnered five votes, it left judges and litigants largely in the dark about the constitutionality of substitute analyst testimony. And this is a big deal. In a state as geographically large as NC and in tough budget times, getting the testing analyst to court is no easy matter, and in some cases impossible. In its most recent decisions the NC Supreme Court weighed in, with prosecution-pleasing results. Below I summarize my main take-away points from these cases. But here’s a cautionary note: While these cases are the law in NC, the final word from the US Supreme Court is still to come. Smart defenders will make objections at trial, thus preserving the issue. 1. Substitute analyst testimony is OK if the expert testifies to an independent opinion based on information reasonably relied upon by experts in the field. This was the holding of State v. Ortiz-Zape, __ N.C. __ (June 27, 2013), a cocaine drug case. Over the defendant’s objection, the trial court allowed the State’s expert witness, Tracey Ray of the CMPD crime lab to testify about the lab’s practices and procedures, her [...]