Michigan v. Richard Perry Bryant

Summary

The Supreme Court held that the statements Anthony Covington, a mortally wounded shooting victim, made to the police officers who found him in a gas station parking lot were nontestimonial: the circumstances of the encounter objectively indicated that the primary purpose of the interrogation was to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency, given an armed shooter of unknown motive and location at large, the use of a gun, and potential threats to the responding officers and the public. Their admission at Richard Bryant's second-degree murder trial therefore did not violate the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause, and the Court vacated the Supreme Court of Michigan's judgment, which had deemed the statements testimonial under Crawford and Davis and had reversed the conviction as prejudicial plain error. The Court clarified that the ongoing-emergency inquiry is highly context-dependent — turning on the type of weapon, the potential scope of threatened victims including police and public, and the declarant's medical condition — and that the objective primary-purpose test examines the statements and actions of both the declarant and the interrogators. Justice Thomas concurred in the judgment on formality-and-solemnity grounds; Justices Scalia and Ginsburg dissented, each contending that Covington's statements were testimonial.