Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. __, 129 S. Ct. 2527 (2009), decided by the United States Supreme Court last month, already has had significant implications for criminal prosecutions in North Carolina. The original wave of questions posed to me about the case pertained to its application in pending prosecutions. I wrote about Melendez-Diaz generally and addressed a number of those questions in an earlier paper posted here. A significant part of the second wave of questions posed to me has pertained to application of Melendez-Diaz in post-conviction proceedings, including motions for appropriate relief and federal habeas petitions. Specifically, a number of people have asked about whether Melendez-Diaz applies retroactively to cases that became final before it was decided. I will begin to address that question in this post. I wrote about retroactivity of judge-made rules five years ago in a paper posted here. That paper sets out the general retroactivity rules and I won't repeat all of them in this post. However, if you need a primer on retroactivity, that is a good place to start. Since that paper was published, the United States Supreme Court has held that Crawford is not retroactive under the rule of Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989). See Whorton v. Bockting, 549 U.S. 406 (2007) (Crawford was a new procedural rule but not a watershed rule of criminal procedure). The Teague anti-retroactivity rule applies to new rules of federal criminal procedure. One of the arguments being asserted by defense lawyers is that Melendez-Diaz is [...]
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