Pitts v. Mississippi: Mandatory screening of child witnesses from defendants violatesConfrontation Clause

By Greg Mermelstein, Deputy Director & General Counsel, Missouri Public Defender

            State statutes that automatically allow child witnesses to be screened from seeing a defendant at trial without an individualized finding of necessity violate the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, the U.S. Supreme Court held November 24, 2025, in Pitts v. Mississippi.

            Jeffery Pitts was charged in Mississippi with sexually abusing a child.

            The trial court allowed the child to testify behind a screen based on a state statute which provided that child witnesses “shall” have the right to testify behind a screen that would allow them to be seen by the judge and jury, but “would obscure the child’s view of the defendant”.

            Pitts objected to screening, but the trial court found the statute to be “mandatory”.

            The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed.

Holding

            The Supreme Court reversed, in a per curiam opinion.

            A “trial court may not deny a defendant his Sixth Amendment right to meet his accusers face to face simply because a state statute permits screening”, the Court said.

            Courts cannot authorize screening based on only generalized findings of necessity, the Court said. 

            The Sixth Amendment allows screening only if a court hears evidence and issues a case-specific finding that screening is necessary to protect the child from trauma that would be caused by testifying in the physical presence of the defendant, at least where such trauma would impair the child’s ability to communicate, the Court said.

            The State sought to distinguish Pitt’s case from prior Supreme Court cases on screening by arguing the child was only four years old.  A witness’s age is “a relevant consideration”, the Court said, but a court must still “hear evidence” and make a “case-specific” finding of necessity before denying face-to-face confrontation.

            The State also claimed that Pitt’s identity was not in question.  “But the Sixth Amendment right to confront one’s accusers face to face does not only apply in cases where identity is at issue”, the Court said.

            Finally, the State argued that prior cases involved a defendant being in a different room from the child and seeing the child only by closed circuit video, and but here, everyone was in the same courtroom.

            “But both approaches deviate from the Sixth Amendment’s usual rule that a defendant is entitled to meet his accusers ‘face to face’”, the Court said. 

            The Court remanded the case to determine if the error here was harmless.  The Court had previously determined that denial of the right to face-to-face confrontation is subject to harmless-error analysis.