Crawford Right to Cross Examine - does it apply to murder victims?

Check out this Article in the Washington Post describing the issue presented in Giles v. California, which was discussed in the Supreme Court on April 22nd. Here is the full oral argument transcript (in pdf).
The basic question is this: Is the prosecution allowed to put in statements made by murder victims before they died or is that a violation of the defendant's 6th amendment rights since they are unable to cross-examine the dead "speaker"?

Under the Crawford case, decided in 2004, a defendant has the Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses when their statements are used against them. But here, the witness is dead, so obviously cannot be confronted. The Crawford case originally contained an exception to the rule when the defendant killed the witness for the purpose of keeping them from testifying.

Here - the woman's statements were accusing the defendant of having "viciously attacked. . . and having threatened her at knifepoint and having threatened to kill her." They were made to the police after a prior assault, but since Giles was never arrested or charged with that assault - the prior Crawford exception doesn't seem to apply.

In argument, Ginsburg makes some interesting points about how the defendant, claiming self-defense, was able to make statements about the victim so her statements might be considered as rebuttal to those statements. But as Scalia pointedly asks, "Is there a rebuttal exception to the hearsay rule?"

And as a silly aside, Justice Breyer makes a great allusion to how witches were tried by dunking under water... and I just -have- to make the Monty Python reference ... "Very small rocks"