Criminal Procedure — confrontation clause

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U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

Criminal

Criminal Procedure — confrontation clause

It is not necessary that the technician who prepared a CD of a prisoner’s phone calls be called to testify.

“Vitrano seizes on the Melendez-Diaz line of cases, asserting that the prison technician who prepared the CDs should have been called to testify at trial. But Vitrano has failed to identify what precisely the ‘missing’ analyst did or said that was hearsay, much less testimonial hearsay. Unlike in Melendez- Diaz and its progeny, we have no report in which the prison technician states, after analysis, that Vitrano was urging Valona to lie or threatening him. Perhaps there was a certification that the calls were stored and pulled in the normal fashion, but Vitrano does not identify it.”

“Preparing an exhibit for trial is not in itself testimonial; we have previously ruled that ‘an expert who gives testimony about the nature of a suspected controlled substance may rely on information gathered and produced by an analyst who does not himself testify.’ Turner, 709 F.3d at 1190. There was thus no need for the government to call the technician who prepared Exhibit 9 as a witness, and no violation of Vitrano’s Sixth Amendment rights.”

Affirmed.

13-2912 U.S. v. Vitrano

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Adelman, J., Kanne, J.