Harmless Error and Standards of Review
Confrontation Clause violations are usually subject to harmless error review. This means that even if evidence has been admitted in violation of the Confrontation Clause, a defendant is not entitled to a new trial if the reviewing court is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the inadmissible evidence did not contribute to the verdict. Harmless error is not a standard of review, and is an analysis for whether the error might have affected the jury's decision.
Where a defendant fails to object to the inadmissible evidence at the time of trial or fails to specify that she or he is objecting on Confrontation Clause grounds, the reviewing court will sometimes only review for more substantial errors such as "plain error" or an error that results in a manifest injustice. Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal review unobjected to Confrontation Clause errors for plain error. State courts vary widely in their requirements for reviewing Confrontation Clause errors, but many review for either plain error, manifest injustice, or another similar standard. In many instances, courts reverse on Confrontation Clause grounds without analyzing whether an error is harmless. The most common reason for omitting such an analysis is the government's failure to raise harmlessness as an issue. Generally, defendants do not raise harmlessness unless the government does so.
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Famous quotes containing the words harmless, error, standards and/or review:
“When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years’ life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Custom calls me to’t.
What custom wills, in all things should we do’t,
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heaped
For truth to o’erpeer.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain’t-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on—our lost narcissism lives on—in our ego ideal.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“Reading any collection of a man’s quotations is like eating the ingredients that go into a stew instead of cooking them together in the pot. You eat all the carrots, then all the potatoes, then the meat. You won’t go away hungry, but it’s not quite satisfying. Only a biography, or autobiography, gives you the hot meal.”
—Christopher Buckley, U.S. author. A review of three books of quotations from Newt Gingrich. “Newtie’s Greatest Hits,” The New York Times Book Review (March 12, 1995)