Teresa Ann Johnson v. Alaska

In Bullcoming v. New Mexico, 564 U.S. 647, 663 (2011), this Court held that the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment prohibits the prosecution in a criminal case from introducing into evidence an absent analyst’s report through a surrogate expert. Bullcoming, however, did not address a number of scenarios, including where “the person testifying is a supervisor, reviewer, or someone else with a personal, albeit limited, connection to the scientific test at issue” or “an expert witness [i]s asked for his independent opinion about underlying testimonial reports that were not themselves admitted into evidence.” Id. at 672–73 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). This Court sought to address some of these issues in Williams v. Illinois, 567 U.S. 50 (2012). But as two Justices of this Court have recognized, Williams “yielded no majority and its various opinions have sown confusion in courts across the country.” Stuart v. Alabama, 139 S. Ct. 36, 37 (2018) (Gorsuch & Sotomayor, JJ., dissenting). Indeed, since Williams, lower courts have widely diverged on whether, and to what extent, surrogate expert testimony is permissible. This case raises the following questions:

1. Whether the Confrontation Clause prohibits the prosecution from introducing into evidence at trial a certified lab report reflecting statements of nontestifying analysts through a surrogate expert who, although a supervisor at the lab, merely reviewed the report and results and did not conduct or observe any of the underlying tests; and

2. Whether the Confrontation Clause prohibits the surrogate expert from testifying at trial about the underlying tests, including the particular samples tested, procedures followed, and results reached. (i)