OMG, you people are hopeless. Don’t you get the distinction? First you apply the standard to determine what is in dispute. THEN, what has been determined as NOT being in dispute is assumed to be true.
Is this REALLY that hard?
Do you mean in the sense that the defense could call a witness saying he heard the Defendant say “I didn’t do it”? That’s textbook hearsay with no exception. It’s not a party admission, nor a statement against interest.
Melbourne’s post seemed to imply that the defendant was testifying.
A direct quote of the defendant is admissible, IIRC (IANAL).
In fact it happens all the time.
the police will happily testify “the suspect told me he did it.”
A person saying A told me that B heard the defendant say"xxxx" is hearsay.
I imagine the only time it might be relevant to allow that, is if B is accused of making that up right there on the stand. (does that open the door?)
Just, unless the circumstances are such that the situation lends authenticity to the quote (“He had a gun to guy’s head and the guy still said he didn’t do it, while bawling and pleading for his life”) - how likely is anyone to believe word of such a denial? Is it even worth putting that on the stand? Ten guys standing around and one asked Fred “did you rob the bank” and he says "“No”. Convincing testimony?
If I read this right, Affirmative Defence means ‘I had a really good excuse’, as opposed to the defense of ‘The prosecutor is full of shit’.
An affirmative defense in the simplest possible terms means “I did it, but I am not criminally culpable or civilly liable regardless.”
“The suspect told me he did it” is non-hearsay and thus admissible only as an admission of a party-opponent. Otherwise it would be textbook hearsay. It’s not admissible simply because it’s a direct quote, and most things a defendant tells somebody else would be hearsay.
That’s nice.
What’s a “party opponent”? Should I keep my trap shut at social mixers?
(But seriously, what defines someone who can testify what the person said?)
Basically, a party opponent is the other side. If you are the prosecution, the defendant is the party opponent. If you are the defendant in a civil case, the plaintiff is the party opponent, etc.
So basically only statements to the prosecution and its minions - police etc. - are admissible?
I’m sure I’ve heard of cases in the news where others have been called to testify what the defendant said to them about the crime? Jailhouse informants are a staple of weak cases needed “beefing up” with whatever a criminal is willing to testify to.
Short version: Hearsay is considered bad because it is statements that are made outside of court, not under oath, where most people are simply lying bastards. There are about 40 exceptions (literally) to this rule where the courts have decided that out of court statements don’t necessarily fall under this disability and should be admitted.
Admission by a party opponent is one—If I say outside of court that I killed someone, then that has some reliability. Why would I say such a thing that is clearly against my own interests unless it was true?
If I say I didn’t do it, then that is likely a self-serving lie. If it’s not, I can say it myself. It doesn’t help the jury to call 22 witnesses who heard me tell them I didn’t do it. I shouldn’t benefit by telling the same lie to 22 people, and even if it is true, it doesn’t add anything substantial.
No. A party admission is not hearsay regardless of who it’s told to. Admissibility is dependent on who is offering the testimony, not who the witness is. A defendant’s out-of-court statement is not admissible if proffered by the defense, for example (except as a prior consistent statement, which is a very limited exception.)
jtgain explains it very well: it’s admissible because it’s the sort of thing the declarant (the person whose statement is being repeated in court) would not be expected to lie about it. You don’t tell people you committed a murder if you didn’t, goes the theory.
It’s important to remember that this is a rule governing admissibility, not weight; if the plaintiff in a civil case testifies that the defendant told him he did it, the jury is entitled to take that testimony with a grain of salt, as it were.
Here is a good example from a case I remembered from reading case law on concealed weapon research, had to search for the name though, but found it.
Police arrested 2 men who were money couriers who were also carrying concealed weapons. The men claimed since they had an affirmitive defense per statute, the arrest was false, the court agreed, as since the AD existed, the officers had NO probable cause to arrest, interesting case.
…The Dietrichs argue, however, that the affirmative defense provisions of O.R.C. § 2923.12(C) make clear that the officers did not, in fact, have probable cause to believe an offense had been committed, was underway, or was about to be committed. Subsection (C)(1) of the statute allows a weapon to be “carried or kept ready at hand by the actor for defensive purposes, while the actor was engaged in or was going to or from the actor’s lawful business or occupation, which business or occupation was of such character or was necessarily carried on in such manner or at such a time or place as to render the actor particularly susceptible to criminal attack, such as would justify a prudent person in going armed.”…
http://federal-circuits.vlex.com/vid/estate-kenneth-dietrich-richard-burrows-36164112
My comment was based on a 20year memory of documents that were old even then, and to my surprise I don’t easily find an support for my opinion. Perhaps it’s just out-dated, or, more likely, I misremembered the idea that
Anything you say to a policeman may be used as evidence against you.
Anything you say to a policeman in self-acquittal is only self-serving hearsay at trial time.
It’s not always the case that self defence is an affirmative defence. It’s not the case in Florida, where a simple assertion that one acted in self defence means the prosecution has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant did not so act. This will probably be extremely important at the George Zimmerman trial.
It does still function as an admission that the defendant committed the act in question, but not that the act was illegal. In general, killing someone in self defence is not illegal. It’s not an excuse for committing an illegal act, the act itself is legal, and the person who acted in self defence is usually the victim of the crime
Generally, that’s correct, but it’s not as terrible as you make it seem. Again, we start from the premise that out of court statements, not made under oath, and not looking the jury in the eye are presumptively bad. As a general rule, we keep all of those statements out. Let people come into court, swear before God or their conscience, and under the penalty of perjury to see if they want to continue to be sneaking, sniveling, lying pricks.
That said, the many exceptions to hearsay recognize that some out of court statements have a good indicia of reliability. One example: an inscription on a tombstone. The undertaker likely has no motivation to lie and made a monument to commemorate a recently deceased. It’s highly unlikely that untruths were put on a permanent marker, so writings on tombstones are admissible.
Likewise, an admission by a party has a good indicia of reliability. People generally don’t go around saying bad things that they’ve done: They keep those secret. If I have a drinking problem, cheat on my wife, kick puppies, or have robbed a bank, generally I won’t talk about them. If I come on the dope, tell a friend, or tell a police officer that I’ve done one of those things, there is a very high chance that it is true, or else why would I say it?
Conversely, if I say that I do NOT have a drinking problem, well, that doesn’t have so much reliability. It may very well be true, but let me say it to the jury while under oath. A statement of innocence is self-serving and does not contain any of the indicia of reliability discussed above. People lie for their own benefit all of the time. If I repeat the same lie (or the same truth) to 50 people, it doesn’t serve the interests of justice to call 50 people to the witness stand who heard me tell them I was innocent. Just because you repeat a self-serving statement doesn’t make it probative for the finders of fact to have it repeated in court. I might as well tell 500 people I’m innocent.
So while the rule seems one-sided, there are very good policy reasons for it to be such.
So, a defendant gets on the stand and testifies that he couldn’t have killed the victim because he was on the other side of town robbing a liquor store. The defense presents some fuzzy security camera video of the robber that sort of looks like the defendant.
Can the prosecution call a rebuttal witness to testify, “Yeah, I was with the defendant last night. He told me he’s never robbed a liquor store in his life. He said that kind of petty crime is for punks and he’s a professional”?
Sort of. Prior inconsistent statements are admissible for impeachment purposes, but not for “truth” purposes. That is, it can’t be offered to prove that the defendant did not rob that liquor store, but it can be offered to show that he may have lied about robbing liquor stores.
I believe that this is not exactly correct, and I would respectfully suggest that jtgain may be mixing two doctrines.
If I am a party to a lawsuit (any party, any suit: civil or criminal case; plaintiff/prosecutor or defendant), statements that I make outside of court are defined to be not hearsay, and those statements can be admitted into evidence at trial by my opponents for any purpose. Fed. R. Evid. 801(d)(2). I cannot introduce my own out-of-court statements myself, however.
Thus, anything I say to a policeman is non-hearsay that the prosecution can admit when I am on trial. The prosecution is trying to convict me, and so it is likely that the only statements they will admit are those that bolster their case. They could admit my statements in which I acquitted myself; there’s just no incentive for them to do so. And I cannot admit them because only an opponent can do so.
jtgain is drawing upon a different rule regarding statements against interest. An out-of-court statement by a witness (any witness, not just a party to the case) that exposes that witness to financial liability or or criminal charges is hearsay, but it can be admitted into evidence under an exception – if the witness is unavailable. Fed. R. Evid. 804(b)(3). Thus, suppose jtgain is on trial for burglarizing the Chicago Reader, and he learns that I bought a plane ticket to Grand Cayman the following day and said to the ticket agent, “Send me someplace warm, with no extradition treaty; I just ripped off the Reader.” He can introduce my statement in his defense, assuming that I did indeed flee the jurisdiction successfully.
In that example, probably not since under 801(c)2, it is being offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted.
Doesn’t matter. Since he’s unavailable it is admissible as against interest for truth and non-truth purposes.