Supreme Court hears Smith v. Arizona over use of substitute expert to relay lab analyst’s statements

The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard argument in Smith v. Arizona, No. 22899, a case testing whether a defendant’s Sixth Amendment confrontation right is violated when the prosecution presents a substitute expert who conveys the out‑of‑court statements of the lab analyst who actually tested the evidence.

Petitioner's counsel told the justices that the state used substitute expert Gregory Longoni to convey statements from lab analyst Elizabeth Rast’s report and notes and that Longoni “had no personal knowledge of the testing that Rast performed.” Counsel argued those statements were testimonial because they were prepared “for the primary purpose of creating evidence to use against Smith” and therefore, by the Sixth Amendment, Smith was entitled to confront Rast in court.

Several justices pressed petitioner on whether admitting an expert’s opinion that relies on another analyst’s work could be avoided by Rule 703 practices: asking the expert hypotheticals, having the expert state only an independent bottom‑line conclusion, or giving jury limiting instructions. Petitioner responded that those approaches do not solve the problem when the expert recounts another person’s specific statements about what tests were run, what procedures were used and what results were reached, because those underlying statements were necessarily offered for their truth.

The United States, through counsel Mister Fagan, told the Court it agreed that Longoni may have “gone too far” in this case but urged a narrow decision. Fagan said courts should preserve the ability to admit an expert’s independent bottom‑line conclusions while allowing methodology or basis evidence to come in with careful limiting instructions in appropriate circumstances. He recommended treating different materials differently: a signed report on agency stationery is most likely testimonial, raw instrument data is unlikely to be, and detailed lab notes fall in between depending on how and why they were prepared.

Respondent counsel (Mister Samuels) argued the trial record supports the view that Longoni offered independent conclusions based on his review of GC‑MS graphs and case records, and that the trial judge correctly found no confrontation violation. He said the notes and report differ and that the record does not show Longoni merely served as a conduit for Rast’s conclusions.

Justices tested several lines of hypotheticals — bench trials, juries given limiting instructions, scenarios where an expert assumes facts rather than recites them — to probe whether the confrontation concern can be cabined to certain circumstances. Questions focused on which rule should govern whether an out‑of‑court statement is testimonial (the Court’s primary‑purpose test, or Justice Thomas’s narrower formality/solemnity approach) and the practical burdens of requiring live testimony from every analyst in multi‑analyst forensic workflows.

Petitioner emphasized that here the materials were formalized — typewritten on Department of Public Services letterhead, signed and served in discovery — and that the prosecutor had coordinated with Rast's testing, factors that petitioner said satisfy tests for testimonial statements.

The case presented the Court with the choice of announcing a broad rule restricting how experts may convey others’ work or issuing a narrower holding that addresses the specific record here. The argument concluded and the case was submitted.