Remote Testimony by Child Abuse Victims OKd : Judiciary: A youngster’s well-being may outweigh a defendant’s right to face his accuser, the Supreme Court says. The ruling upholds laws in 25 states.

Victims in child abuse cases may testify without actually appearing in court and directly confronting those they accuse, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, upholding laws in at least 25 states--including California--designed to protect child witnesses from trauma.

At the same time, in a second case, the high court threw out the conviction of an Idaho woman accused of molesting her daughters, ruling that the woman’s trial was unfair because of testimony by a pediatrician about what the younger daughter had allegedly told him.

The ruling will limit procedures in many states, although not in California, that give doctors and therapists wide latitude to repeat to juries what they say young patients have told them about instances of abuse.

Both high court cases pit the desire of states to protect child witnesses against the rights of adults who may be falsely accused of child abuse and convicted by a child’s unreliable testimony.

In each case, the court split, 5 to 4, with four justices solidly favoring measures to protect child abuse victims and four others voting to protect the rights of defendants. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, voting first with the one side then with the other, cast the deciding vote each time.

For child witnesses, experts say, the idea of appearing in court is frightening all by itself. The prospect of actually coming face to face with the person accused of abusing them can be even more traumatic.

But the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees defendants in “all criminal proceedings” the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against (them).”

Moreover, defense lawyers argue, the testimony of young children often is unreliable or inaccurate, tainted by suggestions children pick up from doctors, therapists and other adults. Being required to confront the person they are accusing can discourage witnesses from testifying falsely, they say.

Once a hidden crime, seldom publicly reported or prosecuted, child abuse in recent years has become one of the most high profile of crimes. It is also one of the most difficult for courts to handle. Law enforcement officials estimate that reported cases are now running at a rate of more than 2.2 million a year.

To make those cases easier to prosecute, the majority of states have adopted procedures--most employing closed-circuit television--to shield children from having to sit in the same room with the defendant when they testify.

California has such a law, but it is almost never used. “It has so many restrictions on it, it’s practically impossible,” said John Myers of the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, a member of the state’s Child Victim/Witness Judicial Advisory Committee.

Two years ago, in a 6-2 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court cast doubt on such laws, ruling against an Iowa procedure in which all child witnesses testified from behind a screen.

This time, two justices--O’Connor and Byron R. White--switched. The case involved a Maryland owner of a kindergarten and day care center who was convicted of child abuse in 1987 after closed-circuit testimony by four children.

The key difference between this case and the 1988 decision, according to O’Connor, was that the law challenged in the 1988 case applied special procedures to all child witnesses across the board.

Maryland’s law, by contrast, requires the trial judge to examine each child witness individually to determine “whether the use of the one-way closed-circuit television procedure is necessary to protect the welfare of the particular child.”

“A state’s interest in the physical and psychological well-being of child abuse victims may be sufficiently important to outweigh, at least in some cases, a defendant’s right to face his or her accusers in court,” O’Connor wrote.

That statement brought a stinging dissent from the conservative Scalia, joined by the court’s three traditional criminal-law liberals--William J. Brennan Jr., Thurgood Marshall and John Paul Stevens.

“The text of the Sixth Amendment is clear” and “the Constitution is meant to protect against, rather than conform to, current ‘widespread belief,’ ” Scalia wrote. “For good or bad, the Sixth Amendment requires confrontation, and we are not at liberty to ignore it.”

In the second case, O’Connor switched sides again, joining Scalia, Brennan, Marshall and Stevens to reverse the conviction of Laura Lee Wright, who was sent to jail for helping her boyfriend rape her two daughters, one 2 1/2 and the other 5 1/2. For technical reasons, Wright appealed only one of the convictions and thus will remain in jail despite Wednesday’s decision.

The chief witness against the couple was a pediatrician, who testified that the younger girl had told him who raped her. Physical evidence indicated that both girls had been raped.

Testimony by witnesses about what other persons said to them is known as hearsay and is generally not admissible in court. In California courts, for example, the doctor generally would have been allowed to testify about his professional opinion that the child had been abused but would not have been allowed to repeat to the jury the child’s remarks about who did it.

“California is perhaps the most restrictive state in the union” on the use of hearsay, Myers said. The Victim/Witness Advisory Committee proposed loosening the rule two years ago, but so far no action has been taken.

Proposition 115, adopted by California voters earlier this month, expanded the use of hearsay testimony, but only in preliminary hearings, not in trials. Because Wednesday’s decision applies to trials, criminal law experts said, the new California rules probably will not be affected.

In many states, such testimony is allowed so long as a judge finds the hearsay “reliable.” In Wright’s case, the judge ruled that the physical evidence that abuse took place corroborated the doctor’s testimony.

O’Connor disagreed. The fact that physical evidence shows that a child was abused by someone provides no corroboration for a statement about who that someone was, O’Connor noted. Because the doctor had no other evidence that his testimony was a reliable account of what the child had said, such as a videotape of the conversation or detailed notes taken at the time, the testimony could not be used, she concluded.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Harry A. Blackmun, Anthony M. Kennedy and White dissented.