Abstract
In Crawford v. Washington, the United States Supreme Court held that if statements “were made under circumstances which would lead an objective witness reasonably to believe that the statements would be available for use at a later trial,” then a defendant has the right to confront and cross examine the witness. However, the Court’s subsequent retreat from this ruling and introduction of the primary purpose test in a later decision, created a flawed federal analysis, as seen in State v. Tsosie. In Tsosie, the New Mexico Supreme Court applied the primary purpose test to determine whether statements of the declarant, recorded in a sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) report, required confrontation. Because the primary purpose test and federal confrontation clause jurisprudence is flawed, and because the New Mexico Constitution has been interpreted to provide defendants with stronger protections than the United States Constitution, through the interstitial approach New Mexico should adopt Massachusetts’ iteration of the Crawford test.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Lana Elledge,
A Primary Purpose Problem: State v. Tsosie,
54
N.M. L. Rev.
321
(2024).
Available at:
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmlr/vol54/iss1/11
