Heather Fawcett did not want to go through a second trial against the man accused of attacking her with a hammer. When Pedro Sanchez was first accused of hitting her head with a hammer five years ago, she went to court. Sanchez was convicted of assault in the second degree by a jury, 10-2. But the U.S. Supreme Court in April struck down Oregon’s long-held nonunanimous jury verdicts, prompting an appellate court to overturn the conviction and grant Sanchez a retrial. That would have put Fawcett in front of Sanchez again. And to make it worse, this time Sanchez asserted his right to meet his accuser face-to-face, demanding she testify without a mask, despite the trial being scheduled in the middle of a pandemic. The 41-year-old McMinnville resident wanted to get justice for herself. But then she thought of her parents, both over 65, one with multiple sclerosis and the other with a failing liver. She ran errands for them, bought groceries and helped clean their houses. “It’s the second time I’m going through this trial, and now you’re gonna tell me I have to expose my friends and my family and people that I care about and myself to this virus?” she said in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive. She decided she couldn’t risk it. She could not testify and potentially expose herself to COVID-19. But both of the other witnesses to the assault — her boyfriend at the time and his brother — have died since the first trial. Without her testimony, the case against Sanchez, which was scheduled to go to trial Monday, Jan. 25, was instead dismissed. Fawcett said she was told by Michelle Enfield, Yamhill County deputy district attorney, she could not wear a mask while testifying because the defendant needed to be able to see her face. In response to a motion by Sanchez’s legal team, Presiding Judge Jennifer Chapman ordered that witnesses must wear a clear face shield and no mask while testifying, according to Enfield. Chapman’s rationale for the decision stems from a so-called “right of confrontation” and the necessity for jurors to see a witness’s face while testifying to determine credibility, Enfield said. Under Article 1, Section 11, of the Oregon Constitution, a defendant has the right to meet a witness “face to face.” https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/20...es-courts-demand-to-testify-without-mask.html
IMO, that's a silly reading of the right to meet a witness "face to face." The purpose behind such rights, as I've understood it, is to prevent having the testimony against you come from anonymous or faked sources. Of course, I'm not a legal scholar, so my understanding could be wrong.
stupid in a lot of ways, including Oregon stupidly refusing for decades to eliminate non-unanimous verdicts
