Podcast Episode 3 - Pitts v. State - 911 calls are admissible as non-testimonial under Crawford v. Washingtion
The Georgia Supreme Court has ruled in Pitts v. State that 911 calls are not testimonial and therefore admissible when a witness is not available despite an objection on 6th amendment grounds and Crawford v. Washington.Â
Click here to listen to the discussion.Â
Below is a post that I wrote on 2-28-06. I deleted it and moved it here because it was causing a problem with the podcast RSS feed.
The Georgia Supreme Court has ruled in Pitts v. State that 911 calls are not testimonial and therefore admissible when a witness is not available despite an objection on 6th amendment grounds and Crawford v. Washington. I should note that the statement would still need to meet a hearsay exception like res gestae or excited utterance.
The bizarre part of this case is where the Court gives examples of how a 911 call may be testimonial or not. It gave an example of a case where a spouse called in to report that her husband had violated his parole as being testimonial because the purpose was to establish an evidentiary fact and not to prevent a crime in progress. Well, in the Pitts case, it too had a spouse mention that her husband was violating his parole.  The court said that part of the tape â€came close†to being testimonial but wasn’t really because she was just trying to explain why the prior difficulties made the current situation a dangerous one.
The flood gates have been opened and barred in place with such wide discretion that almost every 911 call will be non-testimonial. They have really carved out 2 exceptions to Crawford that swallow the rule. 1. To avert a crime progress. 2. To seek assistance in preventing immediate harm. 90% of calls are going to fall in one of these categoreis as non-testimonial. The Court does say that a call may contain a mixture of testimonial and non-testimonial and that those tapes should be redacted. But as I pointed out a minute ago, there may be a third exception that will allow testimonial statements in that explain conduct.
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March 11th, 2006 at 9:12 pm
[…] I spoke to Louis Turchirelli, who was the lawyer on Pitts v. State, which I wrote a post on recently. I asked him if he was going to take the case up on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. He advised me that there was a similar case pending already.  I went to the Supreme Court website and found two cases pending. Davis v. Washington which has been docketed as case number 05-5224. […]
June 19th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
[…] You may recall what I wrote about Pitts v. State here. Pitts dealt with 911 calls and their admissibility when a witness was unavailable to testify at trial. The Crawford v. Washington ramifications of those calls were decided by the Georgia Court of Appeal in Pitts. Click the link above to review that discussion. […]