United States v. Harcrow

STUCKY, Judge,

with whom EFFRON, Chief Judge, joins (concurring in the result):

I concur in the result, but write separately to emphasize that any error in the admission of the laboratory reports, if error at all, cannot be plain error because the state of the law at issue here was (until today) thoroughly unsettled.

This case was tried in 2002, under the Confrontation Clause regime of Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56, 100 S.Ct. 2531, 65 L.Ed.2d 597 (1980), where the sine qua non was whether the out-of-court statement bore “adequate indicia of reliability — i.e., falls within a ‘firmly rooted…