TruTV is reprising the trial of Mark Jensen for murdering his wife, found guilty in 2008 in large part because of a letter she wrote before she died, claiming that if she died suddenly it was because he murdered her. However, a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision (Melendez-Diaz v. MA, I believe) may give Jensen a new trial. At issue is the right of a defendant to confront witnesses against him. “Letters from the grave” aren’t subject to such confrontation.

Two trials that haunt me involved just such accusations, that is, accusations of witnesses who did not testify in court and, therefore, could not be cross-examined: the trial in which I served as a juror and the trial of Raynella Dossett-Leath.

In the trial in which I was a juror the lead investigator (a.k.a.) the chief accuser of the defendant did not testify. The public defender accepted a stipulation from the prosecution about what the detective would have testified if he had been there. But, because he did not appear in court, we, the jury, never heard anything about how the confession was extracted. An assistant state’s attorney read the English-language confession aloud from the witness stand. She said she had been in the jail at 2:00 a.m. when the defendant confessed in Spanish, and she translated it into English for him.

• As I read what I’ve just written, I’m shocked that I accepted this hogwash without question. I can only attribute my stupidity to the fact that at the time I still trusted the judge and assumed this was standard operating procedure.

In the Dossett-Leath case, like the Jensen case, testimony came into the trial without objection that the victim had told a doctor he was afraid that his wife was trying to kill him. And it came into evidence during the prosecution’s cross-examination of the witness, a neurologist who was a key witness for the defense. The doctor was explaining what he had written in his notes about the victim’s paranoid delusions during an episode of dementia two or three years before his death. I found this incident shocking. It seemed as if both the defense attorney and the doctor were completely taken aback when the prosecutor found this reference in his medical records.

Surely, the hearsay testimony of a neurologist about what a mentally disturbed and hospitalized patient now dead said should not be admitted into testimony—whether or not the Supremes would say this accusation from the grave is admissible because the accuser was not available to testify.