Chambers v. Mississippi

Petitioner was convicted or murdering a policeman in a Mississippi trial court and the jury assessed punishment at life imprisonment. At trial, after the State failed to put McDonald, one of Chambers’ friends and a crucial witness of petitioner’s crime, on the stand, Chambers called McDonald, laid a predicate for the introduction of his sworn out-of-court confession, had it admitted into evidence, and read it to the jury. As a consequence of the combination of Mississippi’s party witness rule and its hearsay rule, Chambers was unable either to cross-examine McDonald or to present witnesses in his own behalf who would have discredited McDonald’s repudiation and demonstrated his complicity. Chambers had, however, chipped away at the fringes of McDonald’s story by introducing admissible testimony from other sources indicating that he had not been seen in the cafe where he said he was when the shooting started, that he had not been having beer with Turner, and that he possessed a .22 pistol at the time of the crime. Chambers’ defense was far less persuasive than it might have been had he been given an opportunity to subject McDonald’s statements to cross-examination or had the other confessions been admitted.