Maryland v. Craig

The section of the Sixth Amendment at issue in Craig's case reads: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him." By the time the Supreme Court heard Craig, it was settled law that the Fourteenth Amendment makes the Confrontation Clause applicable in state courts. Writing for the one-vote majority that upheld the Maryland statute, Justice O'Connor was obliged to ignore the plain meaning of the Constitution:

[T]hough we reaffirm the importance of face-to-face confrontation with witnesses appearing at the trial, we cannot say that such confrontation is an indispensable element of the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of the right to confront one's accusers . . . This interpretation of the Confrontation Clause is consistent with our cases holding that other Sixth Amendment rights must also be interpreted in the context of the necessities of trial and the adversary process . . . We see no reason to treat the face-to-face component of the confrontation right any differently, and indeed we think it would be anomalous to do so.

O'Connor went on to explain that the procedure authorized by the Maryland statute violated neither the truth-seeking nor the "symbolic" purposes of the Confrontation Clause. The procedure required the child witness to testify under oath, and permitted both cross-examination and observation of the witness's demeanor.

The four dissenters--Scalia, Brennan, Marshall, and Stevens--did not agree that the purposes of the Confrontation Clause were symbolic. While conceding that the Maryland procedure conformed to "currently favored public policy" and might not be unfair, they did not believe that the Court had any business substituting social policy for the plain meaning of the Constitution. As recently as 1988, the Court had unequivocally stated, in Coy v. Iowa that "the Confrontation Clause guarantees the defendant a face-to-face meeting with witnesses appearing before the trier of fact."

In a companion case to Craig, Idaho v. Wright (1990), the Court ruled by a vote of 5-4 that a physician's account of a child's statements about his alleged sexual abuse by another adult were inadmissible because they were unreliable. The issue of the proper procedure for trying alleged child molesters remained largely unresolved.