High Court to Hear Confrontation Case of Convicted Lawyer
This month the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the case of a disbarred lawyer convicted of child sexual abuse who claims he never got to confront his 6-year-old accuser in court.
The boy testified against Stephen Danforth via videotape, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. The Minnesota Supreme Court had ruled in Danforth’s case that a 2004 Supreme Court ruling on the right to confrontation, Crawford v. Washington, did not apply retroactively to Danforth’s case.
Danforth argues that states should be free to apply more liberal retroactivity rules in cases such as his. SCOTUSblog wrote about the case in May. “The Danforth case is an important test of whether states are constitutionally free to give state prison inmates the retroactive benefit of Supreme Court criminal law procedure rulings, even if the court has not made them retroactive and, indeed, has found they would not apply retroactive[ly],” SCOTUSblog says.
Danforth’s accuser is now 18 years old.
A hat tip to How Appealing, which posted the Star Tribune story.
