Justice Alito delivered the opinion of the Court.
Darius Clark sent his girlfriend hundreds of miles away to engage in prostitution and agreed to care for her two young children while she was out of town. A day later, teachers discovered red marks on her 3-year-old son, and the boy identified Clark as his abuser. The question in this case is whether the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause prohibited prosecutors from introducing those statements when the child was not available to be cross-examined. Because neither the child nor his teachers had the primary purpose of assisting in Clark’s prosecution, the child’s statements do not implicate the Confrontation Clause and therefore were admissible at trial.
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In this case, we consider statements made to preschool teachers, not the police. We are therefore presented with the question we have repeatedly reserved: whether statements to persons other than law enforcement officers are subject to the Confrontation Clause. Because at least some statements to individuals who are not law enforcement officers could conceivably raise confrontation concerns, we decline to adopt a categorical rule excluding them from the Sixth Amendment’s reach. Nevertheless, such statements are much less likely to be testimonial than statements to law enforcement officers. And considering all the relevant circumstances here, L. P.’s statements clearly were not made with the primary purpose of creating evidence for Clark’s prosecution. Thus, their introduction at trial did not violate the Confrontation Clause.
L. P.’s statements occurred in the context of an ongoing emergency involving suspected child abuse. When L. P.’s teachers noticed his injuries, they rightly became worried that the 3-year-old was the victim of serious violence. Because the teachers needed to know whether it was safe to release L. P. to his guardian at the end of the day, they needed to determine who might be abusing the child. [Footnote omitted.] Thus, the immediate concern was to protect a vulnerable child who needed help. …
There is no indication that the primary purpose of the conversation was to gather evidence for Clark’s prosecution. On the contrary, it is clear that the first objective was to protect L. P. At no point did the teachers inform L. P. that his answers would be used to arrest or punish his abuser. L. P. never hinted that he intended his statements to be used by the police or prosecutors. …
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Finally, although we decline to adopt a rule that statements to individuals who are not law enforcement officers are categorically outside the Sixth Amendment, the fact that L. P. was speaking to his teachers remains highly relevant. … It is common sense that the relationship between a student and his teacher is very different from that between a citizen and the police. We do not ignore that reality. In light of these circumstances, the Sixth Amendment did not prohibit the State from introducing L.P.’s statements at trial.
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Clark[] … emphasizes Ohio’s mandatory reporting obligations, in an attempt to equate L. P.’s teachers with the police and their caring questions with official interrogations. But the comparison is inapt. The teachers’ pressing concern was to protect L. P. and remove him from harm’s way. Like all good teachers, they undoubtedly would have acted with the same purpose whether or not they had a state-law duty to report abuse. And mandatory reporting statutes alone cannot convert a conversation between a concerned teacher and her student into a law enforcement mission aimed primarily at gathering evidence for a prosecution.
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Roberts, C. J., and Kennedy, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, JJ., joined.
Justice Scalia, with whom Justice Ginsburg joins, concurring in the judgment.
I agree with the Court’s holding, and with its refusal to decide two questions quite unnecessary to that holding: what effect Ohio’s mandatory-reporting law has in transforming a private party into a state actor for Confrontation Clause purposes, and whether a more permissive Confrontation Clause test—one less likely to hold the statements testimonial—should apply to interrogations by private actors. …
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I write separately, however, to protest the Court’s shoveling of fresh dirt upon the Sixth Amendment right of confrontation so recently rescued from the grave in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U. S. 36 (2004). …
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… Take, for example, the opinion’s statement that the primary-purpose test is merely one of several heretofore unmentioned conditions (“necessary, but not always sufficient”) that must be satisfied before the Clause’s protections apply. Ante, at 7. That is absolutely false, and has no support in our opinions. The Confrontation Clause categorically entitles a defendant to be confronted with the witnesses against him; and the primary-purpose test sorts out, among the many people who interact with the police informally, who is acting as a witness and who is not. Those who fall into the former category bear testimony, and are therefore acting as “witnesses,” subject to the right of confrontation. There are no other mysterious requirements that the Court declines to name.
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Justice Thomas, concurring in the judgment.
I agree with the Court that Ohio mandatory reporters are not agents of law enforcement, that statements made to private persons or by very young children will rarely implicate the Confrontation Clause, and that the admission of the statements at issue here did not implicate that constitutional provision. I nonetheless cannot join the majority’s analysis. …
… [T]he primary purpose test … is just as much “an exercise in fiction . . . disconnected from history” for statements made to private persons as it is for statements made to agents of law enforcement, if not more so. [Citation omitted.] I would not apply it here. Nor would I leave the resolution of this important question in doubt.
Instead, I would use the same test for statements to private persons that I have employed for statements to agents of law enforcement, assessing whether those statements bear sufficient indicia of solemnity to qualify as testimonial. See Crawford, supra, at 51; Davis v. Washington, 547 U. S. 813, 836–837 (2006) (Thomas, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). …
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Here, L. P.’s statements do not bear sufficient indicia of solemnity to qualify as testimonial. They were neither contained in formalized testimonial materials nor obtained as the result of a formalized dialogue initiated by police. Instead, they were elicited during questioning by L. P.’s teachers at his preschool. Nor is there any indication that L. P.’s statements were offered at trial to evade confrontation. To the contrary, the record suggests that the prosecution would have produced L. P. to testify had he been deemed competent to do so. His statements bear no “resemblance to the historical practices that the Confrontation Clause aimed to eliminate.” [Citation omitted.] The admission of L. P.’s extrajudicial statements thus does not implicate the Confrontation Clause.
I respectfully concur in the judgment.