## Facts

- Vickie Lorene Rock was charged with manslaughter after her husband died from a gunshot wound during a domestic dispute in their apartment.
- Rock initially could not recall key details of the shooting.
- On counsel’s advice, Rock underwent two tape-recorded hypnosis sessions conducted by a trained neuropsychologist.
- After hypnosis, Rock recalled details supporting an accidental-discharge theory, including that her finger was not on the trigger when the gun fired and that it discharged as her husband grabbed her arm.
- A firearms expert examined the weapon and reported a defect making it prone to fire without the trigger being pulled, supporting Rock’s account.
- The trial court applied an Arkansas per se evidentiary rule excluding hypnotically refreshed testimony and barred Rock from testifying to details first recalled under hypnosis, permitting only pre-hypnosis statements reflected in the doctor’s notes.
- Rock was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment; the Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed.

## Issues

1. Whether a state’s per se exclusion of a criminal defendant’s hypnotically refreshed testimony violates the defendant’s constitutional right to testify.
2. Whether an evidentiary rule that categorically excludes such testimony is an arbitrary or disproportionate restriction in light of the state’s interest in excluding unreliable evidence.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court vacated the judgment and remanded in a 5–4 decision.
- The Court held that Arkansas’s blanket ban on a defendant’s hypnotically refreshed testimony was unconstitutional as applied to a criminal defendant’s right to testify.
- The Court recognized a constitutional right for criminal defendants to testify on their own behalf, grounded in the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause, the Sixth Amendment Compulsory Process Clause, and the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
- The Court concluded that the per se rule arbitrarily and disproportionately burdened that right because it barred potentially reliable, material defense testimony without individualized assessment.
- The Court noted that reliability concerns could be addressed through case-specific evaluation and traditional trial safeguards, and that administrative convenience did not justify a categorical exclusion.

## Legal Principles

- A criminal defendant has a constitutional right to testify in their own defense, derived from the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of a fair opportunity to defend, the Sixth Amendment’s protection of the ability to present defense evidence, and the Fifth Amendment’s recognition of the defendant’s choice whether to testify.
- State evidentiary rules may restrict testimony, but restrictions on a defendant’s right to testify must not be arbitrary or disproportionate to the purposes they are designed to serve.
- A per se evidentiary exclusion that prevents a defendant from presenting material portions of their account, without individualized reliability assessment, violates the constitutional right to testify.
- Reliability concerns regarding hypnosis do not alone justify a categorical ban where procedural precautions and adversarial testing may permit a reasoned evaluation of the testimony in the particular case.

## Conclusion

The Court held that Arkansas’s categorical exclusion of hypnotically refreshed testimony impermissibly restricted a criminal defendant’s constitutional right to testify, because the blanket rule barred material defense testimony without a case-specific reliability inquiry and was therefore arbitrary and disproportionate to the state’s interest in excluding unreliable evidence.


Rock v. Arkansas, 483 U.S. 44 (1987)