Debate Over the Proposed New Restatement of Employment Law

The Wisconsin Law Journal has an interesting article on the new draft of the Restatement of Employment Law.  As the article discusses, there has been a lot of debate within the employment law community about some aspects of the draft.  Indeed, a group comprised mostly of employment law professors has prepared extensive critical commentary on the draft Restatement.  Our own Paul Secunda co-chaired the working group critiquing the provisions on wrongful discharge in violation of public policy.  The report of his working group is now available on SSRN.

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Confrontation and Criminal Trials: What’s Actually in Play

The long-awaited Supreme Court decision in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts finally came down on June 25, 2009.  See my prior post here.  Neither the majority opinion nor the dissent yield many clues about what took so long (this was the last case from the Court’s November sitting), and on the surface at least there is little that is portentous.  Yet the case is ultimately about far more than hearsay evidence in criminal trials.  It reveals significant discord about the nature of the modern adversary trial as well as skepticism over the use of science in the courtroom. 

The case addressed whether the government may introduce a crime laboratory report (hearsay) against a defendant without calling as a witness the analyst who performed the test.  The Court held that such reports are manufactured expressly for use at trial against the defendant; hence, they constitute “testimonial hearsay” that cannot be introduced without the declarant (the lab analyst) on the witness stand, available for cross-examination.

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Prior Conviction as an Element of a Crime: The Effect of Stipulations After State v. Warbelton

In January of this year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the defendant’s conviction for stalking in State v. Warbelton, 2009 WI 6, 759 N.W.2d 557.  In doing so, the court held that a defendant in a stalking case cannot prevent the State from submitting evidence of the existence of the defendant’s prior violent felony conviction, an element of the crime, by stipulating to the conviction before trial.   

Stipulations to prior convictions became a powerful tool for defense attorneys in Wisconsin following State v. McAllister, 153 Wis. 2d 523, 451 N.W.2d 764 (Ct. App. 1989).  A precursor to the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Old Chief v. United States, the McAllister court held that the State could not submit evidence of the details of the defendant’s prior felony conviction if the defendant offered to stipulate to that element before trial.  The court concluded that the details of the conviction were no longer relevant once the defendant stipulated to it.  The State could satisfy the element by submitting a certified record of the defendant’s conviction to the jury. 

The court in State v. Alexander addressed the derivative question left by McAllister: may the defendant completely prevent the jury from considering the prior conviction element by stipulating to the prior conviction before trial? 

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