Before the trial was brought to court, a motion was raised by the accused that his 6th amendment right would be violated due to the closed circuit testimony. The trial court concluded that due to the fact that under the procedure, the accused retained the essence of the right of confrontation; (by still being able to visibly see the child's entire face and mouth; and the fact that the child would be able to be cross examined by the defense counsel.) and based upon expert testimony presented by the state, that the testimony in a courtroom of the alleged victim and other children who were alleged to have been sexually abused by the accused would result in each child's suffering serious emotional distress such that the child could not reasonably communicate. In an opinion written by the Supreme Court, O'Connor, J., joined by Rehnquist, said that, "it was held that the confrontation clause did not absolutely prohibit the child witnesses from testifying through the statutory procedure, because (1) face-to-face confrontation with witnesses appearing at trial is not an indispensable element of the Sixth Amendment's confrontation the word "confront," as used in the confrontation clause, cannot simply mean face-to-face confrontation; (2) the Supreme Court, in prior cases, had held that other Sixth Amendment rights must be interpreted in the context of the necessities of trial and the adversary process; (3) the statutory procedure insured the reliability of the evidence by subjecting it to rigorous adversarial testing, and thereby preserved the essence of effective confrontation, where, under the procedure, the witnesses testified under oath, were subject to full cross-examination, and were able to be observed as they testified by the judge, jury, and defendant; and (4) a state's interest in the physical and psychological well-being of child abuse victims may be sufficiently important to outweigh, at least in some cases, a defendant's right to face his or her accusers in court.
Introduction With the end of the Cold War, several domestic conflicts have exploded throughout the world as well as a proliferation in the number of negotiations attempting to settle these conflicts. Many scholars investigating this new phenomena have concluded that there has been a transition fr...