SOTOMAYOR, J.
At respondent Richard Bryant’s trial, the court admitted statements that the victim, Anthony Covington, made to police officers who discovered him mortally wounded in a gas station parking lot. A jury convicted Bryant of, inter alia, second-degree murder. 483 Mich. 132, 137, 768
N. W. 2d 65, 67–68 (2009). On appeal, the Supreme Court of Michigan held that the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, as explained in our decisions in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U. S. 36 (2004), and Davis v. Washington, 547 U. S. 813 (2006), rendered Covington’s statements inadmissible testimonial hearsay, and the court reversed Bryant’s conviction. 483 Mich., at 157, 768 N. W. 2d, at 79. We granted the State’s petition for a writ of certiorari to consider whether the Confrontation Clause barred the admission at trial of Covington’s statements to the police. We hold that the circumstances of the interaction between Covington and the police objectively indicate that the “primary purpose of the interrogation” was “to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency.” Davis, 547 U. S., at 822. Therefore, Covington’s identification and description of the shooter and the location of the shooting were not testimonial statements, and their admission at Bryant’s trial did not violate the Confrontation Clause. We vacate the judgment of the Supreme Court of Michigan and remand.
Around 3:25 a.m. on April 29, 2001, Detroit, Michigan police officers responded to a radio dispatch indicating that a man had been shot. At the scene, they found the victim, Anthony Covington, lying on the ground next to his car in a gas station parking lot. Covington had a gunshot wound to his abdomen, appeared to be in great pain, and spoke with difficulty.
The police asked him “what had happened, who had shot him, and where the shooting had occurred.” 483 Mich., at 143, 768 N. W. 2d, at 71. Covington stated that “Rick” shot him at around 3 a.m. Id., at 136, and n. 1, 768 N. W. 2d, at 67, and n. 1. He also indicated that he had a conversation with Bryant, whom he recognized based on his voice, through the back door of Bryant’s house. Covington explained that when he turned to leave, he was shot through the door and then drove to the gas station, where police found him.
Covington’s conversation with the police ended within 5to 10 minutes when emergency medical services arrived. Covington was transported to a hospital and died within hours. . . . .
. . . .
In 2006, the Court in Davis v. Washington and Hammon v. Indiana, 547 U. S. 813, took a further step to “determine more precisely which police interrogations produce testimony” and therefore implicate a Confrontation Clause bar. Id., at 822. We explained that when Crawford said that
“‘interrogations by law enforcement officers fall squarely within [the] class’ of testimonial hearsay, we had immediately in mind (for that was the case before us) interrogations solely directed at establishing the facts of a past crime, in order to identify (or provide evidence to convict) the perpetrator. The product of such interrogation, whether reduced to a writing signed by the declarant or embedded in the memory (and perhaps notes) of the interrogating officer, is testimonial.” Davis, 547 U. S., at 826.
We thus made clear in Davis that not all those questioned by the police are witnesses and not all “interrogations by law enforcement officers,” Crawford, 541 U. S., at 53, are subject to the Confrontation Clause. [Footnote omitted.]
. . . .
To address the facts of both cases, we expanded upon the meaning of “testimonial” that we first employed in Crawford and discussed the concept of an ongoing emergency. We explained:
“Statements are nontestimonial when made in the course of police interrogation under circumstances objectively indicating that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency. They are testimonial when the circumstances objectively indicate that there is no such ongoing emergency, and that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to establish or prove past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution.” Davis, 547 U. S., at 822.
Examining the Davis and Hammon statements in light of those definitions, we held that the statements at issue in Davis were nontestimonial and the statements in Hammon were testimonial. We distinguished the statements in Davis from the testimonial statements in Crawford on several grounds, including that the victim in Davis was “speaking about events as they were actually happening, rather than ‘describ[ing] past events,’” that there was an ongoing emergency, that the “elicited statements were necessary to be able to resolve the present emergency,” and that the statements were not formal. 547 U. S., at 827. In Hammon, on the other hand, we held that, “[i]t is entirely clear from the circumstances that the interrogation was part of an investigation into possibly criminal past conduct.” Id., at 829. There was “no emergency in progress.” Ibid. The officer questioning Amy “was not seeking to determine . . . ‘what is happening,’ but rather ‘what happened.’” Id., at 830. It was “formal enough” that the police interrogated Amy in a room separate from her husband where, “some time after the events described were over,” she “deliberately recounted, in response to police questioning, how potentially criminal past events began and progressed.” Ibid. Because her statements “were neither a cry for help nor the provision of information enabling officers immediately to end a threatening situation,” id., at 832, we held that they were testimonial.
Davis did not “attemp[t] to produce an exhaustive classification of all conceivable statements—or even all conceivable statements in response to police interrogation—as either testimonial or nontestimonial.” Id., at 822. [Footnote omitted.] The basic purpose of the Confrontation Clause was to “targe[t]”the sort of “abuses” exemplified at the notorious treason trial of Sir Walter Raleigh. Crawford, 541 U. S., at 51. Thus, the most important instances in which the Clause restricts the introduction of out-of-court statements are those in which state actors are involved in a formal, out-of-court interrogation of a witness to obtain evidence for trial. [Footnote omitted.] See id., at 43–44. . . . When, as in Davis, the primary purpose of an interrogation is to respond to an “ongoing emergency,” its purpose is not to create a record for trial and thus is not within the scope of the Clause. But there may be other circumstances, aside from ongoing emergencies, when a statement is not procured with a primary purpose of creating an out-of-court substitute for trial testimony. In making the primary purpose determination, standard rules of hearsay, designed to identify some statements as reliable, will be relevant. Where no such primary purpose exists, the admissibility of a statement is the concern of state and federal rules of evidence, not the Confrontation Clause. [Footnote omitted.]
Deciding this case also requires further explanation of the “ongoing emergency” circumstance addressed in Davis. Because Davis and Hammon arose in the domestic violence context, that was the situation “we had immediately in mind (for that was the case before us).” 547 U. S., at 826. We now face a new context: a nondomestic dispute, involving a victim found in a public location, suffering from a fatal gunshot wound, and a perpetrator whose location was unknown at the time the police located the victim. Thus, we confront for the first time circumstances in which the “ongoing emergency” discussed in Davis extends beyond an initial victim to a potential threat to the responding police and the public at large. This new context requires us to provide additional clarification with regard to what Davis meant by “the primary purpose of the interrogation is to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency.” Id., at 822.
To determine whether the “primary purpose” of an interrogation is “to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency,” Davis, 547 U. S., at 822, which would render the resulting statements nontestimonial, we objectively evaluate the circumstances in which the encounter occurs and the statements and actions of the parties.
. . . .
An objective analysis of the circumstances of an encounter and the statements and actions of the parties to it provides the most accurate assessment of the “primary purpose of the interrogation.” The circumstances in which an encounter occurs—e.g., at or near the scene of the crime versus at a police station, during an ongoing emergency or afterwards—are clearly matters of objective fact. The statements and actions of the parties must also be objectively evaluated. That is, the relevant inquiry is not the subjective or actual purpose of the individuals involved in a particular encounter, but rather the purpose that reasonable participants would have had, as ascertained from the individuals’ statements and actions and the circumstances in which the encounter occurred. [Footnote omitted.]
As our recent Confrontation Clause cases have explained, the existence of an “ongoing emergency” at the time of an encounter between an individual and the police is among the most important circumstances informing the “primary purpose” of an interrogation. . . . The existence of an ongoing emergency is relevant to determining the primary purpose of the interrogation because an emergency focuses the participants on something other than “prov[ing] past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution.” [Footnote omitted.] Davis, 547 U. S., at 822. Rather, it focuses them on “end[ing] a threatening situation.” Id., at 832. Implicit in Davis is the idea that because the prospect of fabrication in statements given for the primary purpose of resolving that emergency is presumably significantly diminished, the Confrontation Clause does not require such statements to be subject to the crucible of cross-examination.
. . . .
Domestic violence cases like Davis and Hammon often have a narrower zone of potential victims than cases involving threats to public safety. An assessment of whether an emergency that threatens the police and public is ongoing cannot narrowly focus on whether the threat solely to the first victim has been neutralized because the threat to the first responders and public may continue. . . . .
The Michigan Supreme Court also did not appreciate that the duration and scope of an emergency may depend in part on the type of weapon employed. . . . .
The Michigan Supreme Court’s failure to focus on the context-dependent nature of our Davis decision also led it to conclude that the medical condition of a declarant is irrelevant. . . . .
. . . The medical condition of the victim is important to the primary purpose inquiry to the extent that it sheds light on the ability of the victim to have any purpose at all in responding to police questions and on the likelihood that any purpose formed would necessarily be a testimonial one. The victim’s medical state also provides important context for first responders to judge the existence and magnitude of a continuing threat to the victim, themselves, and the public.
. . . [N]one of this suggests that an emergency is ongoing in every place or even just surrounding the victim for the entire time that the perpetrator of a violent crime is on the loose. As we recognized in Davis, “a conversation which begins as an interrogation to determine the need for emergency assistance” can “evolve into testimonial statements.” 547 U. S., at 828 (internal quotation marks omitted). This evolution may occur if, for example, a declarant provides police with information that makes clear that what appeared to be an emergency is not or is no longer an emergency or that what appeared to be a public threat is actually a private dispute. It could also occur if a perpetrator is disarmed, surrenders, is apprehended, or, as in Davis, flees with little prospect of posing a threat to the public. Trial courts can determine in the first instance when any transition from nontestimonial to testimonial occurs, [footnote omitted] and exclude “the portions of any statement that have become testimonial, as they do, for example, with unduly prejudicial portions of otherwise admissible evidence.” Id., at 829.
Finally, our discussion of the Michigan Supreme Court’s misunderstanding of what Davis meant by “ongoing emergency” should not be taken to imply that the existence vel non of an ongoing emergency is dispositive of the testimonial inquiry. As Davis made clear, whether an ongoing emergency exists is simply one factor—albeit an important factor—that informs the ultimate inquiry regarding the “primary purpose” of an interrogation. Another factor the Michigan Supreme Court did not sufficiently account for is the importance of informality in an encounter between a victim and police. Formality is not the sole touchstone of our primary purpose inquiry because, although formality suggests the absence of an emergency and therefore an increased likelihood that the purpose of the interrogation is to “establish or prove past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution,” id., at 822, informality does not necessarily indicate the presence of an emergency or the lack of testimonial intent. Cf. id., at 826 (explaining that Confrontation Clause requirements cannot “readily be evaded” by the parties deliberately keeping the written product of an interrogation informal “instead of having the declarant sign a deposition”). The court below, however, too readily dismissed the informality of the circumstances in this case in a single brief footnote and in fact seems to have suggested that the encounter in this case was formal. . . . As we explain further below, the questioning in this case occurred in an exposed, public area, prior to the arrival of emergency medical services, and in a disorganized fashion. All of those facts make this case distinguishable from the formal station-house interrogation in Crawford.
In addition to the circumstances in which an encounter occurs, the statements and actions of both the declarant and interrogators provide objective evidence of the primary purpose of the interrogation. . . . .
. . . Davis requires a combined inquiry that accounts for both the declarant and the interrogator. [Footnote omitted.] In many instances, the primary purpose of the interrogation will be most accurately ascertained by looking to the contents of both the questions and the answers. To give an extreme example, if the police say to a victim, “Tell us who did this to you so that we can arrest and prosecute them,” the victim’s response that “Rick did it,” appears purely accusatory because by virtue of the phrasing of the question, the victim necessarily has prosecution in mind when she answers.
The combined approach also ameliorates problems that could arise from looking solely to one participant. Predominant among these is the problem of mixed motives on the part of both interrogators and declarants. Police officers in our society function as both first responders and criminal investigators. Their dual responsibilities may mean that they act with different motives simultaneously or in quick succession. . . . .
Victims are also likely to have mixed motives when they make statements to the police. During an ongoing emergency, a victim is most likely to want the threat to her and to other potential victims to end, but that does not necessarily mean that the victim wants or envisions prosecution of the assailant. A victim may want the attacker to be incapacitated temporarily or rehabilitated. Alternatively, a severely injured victim may have no purpose at all in answering questions posed; the answers may be simply reflexive. The victim’s injuries could be so debilitating as to prevent her from thinking sufficiently clearly to understand whether her statements are for the purpose of addressing an ongoing emergency or for the purpose of future prosecution. [Footnote omitted.] Taking into account a victim’s injuries does not transform this objective inquiry into a subjective one. The inquiry is still objective because it focuses on the understanding and purpose of a reasonable victim in the circumstances of the actual victim—circumstances that prominently include the victim’s physical state.
. . . .
. . . The existence of an emergency or the parties’ perception that an emergency is ongoing is among the most important circumstances that courts must take into account in determining whether an interrogation is testimonial because statements made to assist police in addressing an ongoing emergency presumably lack the testimonial purpose that would subject them to the requirement of confrontation. [Footnote omitted.] As the context of this case brings into sharp relief, the existence and duration of an emergency depend on the type and scope of danger posed to the victim, the police, and the public.
. . . .
As explained above, the scope of an emergency in terms of its threat to individuals other than the initial assailant and victim will often depend on the type of dispute involved. Nothing Covington said to the police indicated that the cause of the shooting was a purely private dispute or that the threat from the shooter had ended. The record reveals little about the motive for the shooting. The police officers who spoke with Covington at the gas station testified that Covington did not tell them what words Covington and Rick had exchanged prior to the shooting. [Footnote omitted.] What Covington did tell the officers was that he fled Bryant’s back porch, indicating that he perceived an ongoing threat. [Footnote omitted.] The police did not know, and Covington did not tell them, whether the threat was limited to him. The potential scope of the dispute and therefore the emergency in this case thus stretches more broadly than those at issue in Davis and Hammon and encompasses a threat potentially to the police and the public.
This is also the first of our post-Crawford Confrontation Clause cases to involve a gun. The physical separation that was sufficient to end the emergency in Hammon was not necessarily sufficient to end the threat in this case; Covington was shot through the back door of Bryant’s house. Bryant’s argument that there was no ongoing emergency because “[n]o shots were being fired,” . . ., surely construes ongoing emergency too narrowly. An emergency does not last only for the time between when the assailant pulls the trigger and the bullet hits the victim. If an out-of-sight sniper pauses between shots, no one would say that the emergency ceases during the pause. That is an extreme example and not the situation here, but it serves to highlight the implausibility, at least as to certain weapons, of construing the emergency to last only precisely as long as the violent act itself, as some have construed our opinion in Davis. . . . .
At no point during the questioning did either Covington or the police know the location of the shooter. . . . .
. . . We need not decide precisely when the emergency ended because Covington’s encounter with the police and all of the statements he made during that interaction occurred within the first few minutes of the police officers’ arrival and well before they secured the scene of the shooting—the shooter’s last known location.
. . . We reiterate, moreover, that the existence vel non of an ongoing emergency is not the touchstone of the testimonial inquiry; rather, the ultimate inquiry is whether the “primary purpose of the interrogation [was] to enable police assistance to meet [the] ongoing emergency.” Davis, 547
U. S., at 822. We turn now to that inquiry, as informed by the circumstances of the ongoing emergency just described. The circumstances of the encounter provide important context for understanding Covington’s statements to the police. When the police arrived at Covington’s side, their first question to him was “What happened?” [Footnote omitted.] Covington’s response was either “Rick shot me” or “I was shot,” followed very quickly by an identification of “Rick” as the shooter. App. 76. In response to further questions, Covington explained that the shooting occurred through the back door of Bryant’s house and provided a physical description of the shooter. When he made the statements, Covington was lying in a gas station parking lot bleeding from a mortal gunshot wound to his abdomen. His answers to the police officers’ questions were punctuated with questions about when emergency medical services would arrive. . . . He was obviously in considerable pain and had difficulty breathing and talking. . . . From this description of his condition and report of his statements, we cannot say that a person in Covington’s situation would have had a “primary purpose” “to establish or prove past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution.” Davis, 547
U. S., at 822.
For their part, the police responded to a call that a man had been shot. As discussed above, they did not know why, where, or when the shooting had occurred. Nor did they know the location of the shooter or anything else about the circumstances in which the crime occurred. [Footnote omitted.] The questions they asked—“what had happened, who had shot him, and where the shooting occurred,” . . . —were the exact type of questions necessary to allow the police to “ ‘assess the situation, the threat to their own safety, and possible danger to the potential victim’ ” and to the public, . . . , including to allow them to ascertain “whether they would be encountering a violent felon,” [Footnote omitted.] Davis, 547 U. S., at 827. In other words, they solicited the information necessary to enable them “to meet an ongoing emergency.” Id., at 822.
Nothing in Covington’s responses indicated to the police that, contrary to their expectation upon responding to a call reporting a shooting, there was no emergency or that a prior emergency had ended. Covington did indicate that he had been shot at another location about 25 minutes earlier, but he did not know the location of the shooter at the time the police arrived and, as far as we can tell from the record, he gave no indication that the shooter, having shot at him twice, would be satisfied that Covington was only wounded. In fact, Covington did not indicate any possible motive for the shooting, and thereby gave no reason to think that the shooter would not shoot again if he arrived on the scene. As we noted in Davis, “initial inquiries” may “often . . . produce nontestimonial statements.” Id., at 832. The initial inquiries in this case resulted in the type of nontestimonial statements we contemplated in Davis.
Finally, we consider the informality of the situation and the interrogation. This situation is more similar, though not identical, to the informal, harried 911 call in Davis than to the structured, station-house interview in Crawford. As the officers’ trial testimony reflects, the situation was fluid and somewhat confused: the officers arrived at different times; apparently each, upon arrival, asked Covington “what happened?” . . . .
Because the circumstances of the encounter as well as the statements and actions of Covington and the police objectively indicate that the “primary purpose of the interrogation” was “to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency,” Davis, 547 U. S., at 822, Covington’s identification and description of the shooter and the location of the shooting were not testimonial hearsay. The Confrontation Clause did not bar their admission at Bryant’s trial.
ROBERTS, C. J., and KENNEDY, BREYER, and ALITO, JJ., joined.
JUSTICE KAGAN took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.
THOMAS, J., concurred with opinion:
. . . As the majority notes, Covington interacted with the police under highly informal circumstances, while he bled from a fatal gunshot wound. . . .The police questioning was not “a formalized dialogue,” did not result in “formalized testimonial materials” such as a deposition or affidavit, and bore no “indicia of solemnity.” . . . Nor is there any indication that the statements were offered at trial “in order to evade confrontation.” . . . This interrogation bears little if any resemblance to the historical practices that the Confrontation Clause aimed to eliminate. Covington thus did not “bea[r] testimony” against Bryant, . . . and the introduction of his statements at trial did not implicate the Confrontation Clause. I concur in the judgment.
SCALIA, J., dissented with opinion:
Today’s tale—a story of five officers conducting successive examinations of a dying man with the primary purpose, not of obtaining and preserving his testimony regarding his killer, but of protecting him, them, and others from a murderer somewhere on the loose—is so transparently false that professing to believe it demeans this institution. But reaching a patently incorrect conclusion on the facts is a relatively benign judicial mischief; it affects, after all, only the case at hand. In its vain attempt to make the incredible plausible, however—or perhaps as an intended second goal—today’s opinion distorts our Confrontation Clause jurisprudence and leaves it in a shambles. Instead of clarifying the law, the Court makes itself the obfuscator of last resort. Because I continue to adhere to the Confrontation Clause that the People adopted, as described in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U. S. 36 (2004), I dissent.
. . . .
Crawford and Davis did not address whose perspective matters—the declarant’s, the interrogator’s, or both— when assessing “the primary purpose of [an] interrogation.” In those cases the statements were testimonial from any perspective. I think the same is true here, but because the Court picks a perspective so will I: The declarant’s intent is what counts. In-court testimony is more than a narrative of past events; it is a solemn declaration made in the course of a criminal trial. For an out-of-court statement to qualify as testimonial, the declarant must intend the statement to be a solemn declaration rather than an unconsidered or offhand remark; and he must make the statement with the understanding that it maybe used to invoke the coercive machinery of the State against the accused. . . . .
A declarant-focused inquiry is also the only inquiry that would work in every fact pattern implicating the Confrontation Clause. The Clause applies to volunteered testimony as well as statements solicited through police interrogation. See Davis, supra, at 822–823, n. 1. An inquiry into an officer’s purposes would make no sense when a declarant blurts out “Rick shot me” as soon as the officer arrives on the scene. I see no reason to adopt a different test—one that accounts for an officer’s intent—when the officer asks “what happened” before the declarant makes his accusation. (This does not mean the interrogator is irrelevant. The identity of an interrogator, and the content and tenor of his questions, can bear upon whether a declarant intends to make a solemn statement, and envisions its use at a criminal trial. But none of this means that the interrogator’s purpose matters.). . . .
. . . .
Looking to the declarant’s purpose (as we should), this is an absurdly easy case. Roughly 25 minutes after Anthony Covington had been shot, Detroit police responded to a 911call reporting that a gunshot victim had appeared at a neighborhood gas station. They quickly arrived at the scene, and in less than 10 minutes five different Detroit police officers questioned Covington about the shooting. Each asked him a similar battery of questions: “what happened” and when, . . . “who shot” the victim,” . . . and “where” did the shooting take place . . . . After Covington would answer, they would ask follow-up questions, such as “how tall is” the shooter, . . . “[h]ow much does he weigh,” . . . what is the exact address or physical description of the house where the shooting took place, and what chain of events led to the shooting. The battery relented when the paramedics arrived and began tending to Covington’s wounds.
From Covington’s perspective, his statements had little value except to ensure the arrest and eventual prosecution of Richard Bryant. He knew the “threatening situation,” Davis, 547 U. S., at 832, had ended six blocks away and 25 minutes earlier when he fled from Bryant’s back porch. . . . Bryant had not confronted him face-to-face before he was mortally wounded, instead shooting him through a door. . . . Even if Bryant had pursued him (unlikely), and after seeing that Covington had ended up at the gas station was unable to confront him there before the police arrived (doubly unlikely), it was entirely beyond imagination that Bryant would again open fire while Covington was surrounded by five armed police officers. And Covington knew the shooting was the work of a drug dealer, not a spree killer who might randomly threaten others. . . . .
Covington’s knowledge that he had nothing to fear differs significantly from Michelle McCottry’s state of mind during her “frantic” statements to a 911 operator at issue in Davis, 547 U. S., at 827. Her “call was plainly a call for help against a bona fide physical threat” describing “events as they were actually happening.” Ibid. She did not have the luxuries of police protection and of time and space separating her from immediate danger that Covington enjoyed when he made his statements. See id., at 831.
Covington’s pressing medical needs do not suggest that he was responding to an emergency, but to the contrary reinforce the testimonial character of his statements. He understood the police were focused on investigating a past crime, not his medical needs. . . . .
Neither Covington’s statements nor the colloquy between him and the officers would have been out of place at a trial; it would have been a routine direct examination. . . . .
The Court’s distorted view creates an expansive exception to the Confrontation Clause for violent crimes. Because Bryant posed a continuing threat to public safety in the Court’s imagination, the emergency persisted for confrontation purposes at least until the police learned his “motive for and location after the shooting.” Ante, at 27. It may have persisted in this case until the police “secured the scene of the shooting” two-and-a-half hours later. Ante, at 28. (The relevance of securing the scene is unclear so long as the killer is still at large—especially if, as the Court speculates, he may be a spree-killer.) This is a dangerous definition of emergency. . . . .
. . . .
The Court announces that in future cases it will look to “standard rules of hearsay, designed to identify some statements as reliable,” when deciding whether a statement is testimonial. . . . Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U. S. 56 (1980) said something remarkably similar: An out-of-court statement is admissible if it “falls within a firmly rooted hearsay exception” or otherwise “bears adequate ‘indicia of reliability.’” Id., at 66. We tried that approach to the Confrontation Clause for nearly 25 years before Crawford rejected it as an unworkable standard unmoored from the text and the historical roots of the Confrontation Clause. . . . .
Is it possible that the Court does not recognize the contradiction between its focus on reliable statements and Crawford’s focus on testimonial ones? Does it not realize that the two cannot coexist? Or does it intend, by following today’s illogical roadmap, to resurrect Roberts by a thousand unprincipled distinctions without ever explicitly overruling Crawford? . . . .
The Court recedes from Crawford in a second significant way. It requires judges to conduct “open-ended balancing tests” and “amorphous, if not entirely subjective,” inquiries into the totality of the circumstances bearing upon reliability. . . . Where the prosecution cries “emergency,” the admissibility of a statement now turns on “a highly context-dependent inquiry,” . . . into the type of weapon the defendant wielded . . .; the type of crime the defendant committed . . .; the medical condition of the declarant . . . ; if the declarant is injured, whether paramedics have arrived on the scene . . . ; whether the encounter takes place in an “exposed public area,” . . .; whether the encounter appears disorganized . . . ; whether the declarant is capable of forming a purpose . . . ; whether the police have secured the scene of the crime . . .; the formality of the statement . . .; and finally, whether the statement strikes us as reliable . . . . This is no better than the nine-factor balancing test we rejected in Crawford, 541 U. S., at 63. I do not look forward to resolving conflicts in the future over whether knives and poison are more like guns or fists for Confrontation Clause purposes, or whether rape and armed robbery are more like murder or domestic violence.
JUSTICE GINSBURG, dissenting.
I agree with JUSTICE SCALIA that Covington’s statements were testimonial and that “[t]he declarant’s intent is what counts.” . . . Even if the interrogators’ intent were what counts, I further agree, Covington’s statements would still be testimonial. . . . It is most likely that “the officers viewed their encounter with Covington [as] an investigation into a past crime with no ongoing or immediate consequences.” . . . Today’s decision, JUSTICE SCALIA rightly notes, “creates an expansive exception to the Confrontation Clause for violent crimes.” . . . In so doing, the decision confounds our recent Confrontation Clause jurisprudence, . . .which made it plain that “[r]eliability tells us nothing about whether a statement is testimonial,” . . ..
I would add, however, this observation. In Crawford v. Washington, 541 U. S. 36, 56, n. 6 (2004), this Court noted that, in the law we inherited from England, there was a well-established exception to the confrontation requirement: The cloak protecting the accused against admission of out-of-court testimonial statements was removed for dying declarations. This historic exception, we recalled in Giles v. California, 554 U. S. 353, 358 (2008); see id., at 361–362, 368, applied to statements made by a person about to die and aware that death was imminent. Were the issue properly tendered here, I would take up the question whether the exception for dying declarations survives our recent Confrontation Clause decisions. The Michigan Supreme Court, however, held, as a matter of state law, that the prosecutor had abandoned the issue. See 483 Mich. 132, 156–157, 768 N. W. 2d 65, 78 (2009). The matter, therefore, is not one the Court can address in this case.