Here at Bucks County criminal defense lawyers, we've already talked about the hearsay exception of a Statement Against Interest. If a declarant is unavailable, there is a challenge under the Fifth Amendment right to confront witnesses against a defendant.
In Crawford v. Washington, the United Supreme Court held that in criminal cases, the Confrontation Clause forbids the admission of "testimonial" statements of a witness who did not appear at trial unless that witness was unavailable to testify and the defendant had had a prior opportunity for cross-examination. As the Third Circuit explained, The lynchpin of the Crawford decision ... is its distinction between testimonial and nontestimonail hearsay; simply put, the rule accounced in Crawford applies only to the former category of statements.
The admissibility of nontestimonial hearsay for purposese of the Confrontation Clause continues to be governed by standards set forth in Ohio v. Roberts from 1980. There, the Court held that hearsay statements could be admitted at trial only when: (1) "the evidence falls within a firmly rooted hearsay exception," or (2) they contained "particularized guarantees of trustworthiness" such that adversarial testing of the statements would add little to the statements' reliability.
Thus, the fundamental question in criminal cases with respect to the admissibility of hearsay evidence is what confrontation analysis applies - Crawford or Ohio?