Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/510

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WHITE v. ILLINOIS Opinion of the Court

We consider as a preliminary matter an argument not considered below but urged by the United States as amicus curiae in support of respondent. The United States contends that petitioner’s Confrontation Clause claim should be rejected because the Confrontation Clause’s limited purpose is to prevent a particular abuse common in 16th- and 17thcentury England: prosecuting a defendant through the presentation of ex parte affidavits, without the affiants ever being produced at trial. Because S. G.’s out-of-court statements do not fit this description, the United States suggests that S. G. was not a “witness against” petitioner within the meaning of the Clause. The United States urges this position, apparently in order that we might further conclude that the Confrontation Clause generally does not apply to the introduction of out-of-court statements admitted under an accepted hearsay exception. The only situation in which the Confrontation Clause would apply to such an exception, it argues, would be those few cases where the statement sought to be admitted was in the character of an ex parte affidavit, i. e., where the circumstances surrounding the outof-court statement’s utterance suggest that the statement has been made for the principal purpose of accusing or incriminating the defendant. Such a narrow reading of the Confrontation Clause, which would virtually eliminate its role in restricting the admission of hearsay testimony, is foreclosed by our prior cases. The discussions in these cases, going back at least as far as Mattox v. United States, 156 U. S. 237 (1895), have included historical examination of the origins of the Confrontation Clause and of the state of the law of evidence existing at the time the Sixth Amendment was adopted and later. We have been careful “not to equate the Confrontation Clause’s prohibitions with the general rule prohibiting the admission of hearsay statements.” Idaho v. Wright, 497 U. S. 805, 814 (1990) (citations omitted). Nonetheless, we have consistently sought to “stee[r] a middle course,” Roberts, supra, at