I have previously written about how the State may obtain the medical records of a person suspected of or charged with impaired driving. This post focuses on the requirements for admitting those records at trial.
hearsay
Emojis in Court
Love them or hate them, it looks like “emojis” are here to stay. As of this writing, more than 3,000 emojis have been officially recognized, standardized, and named by the Unicode Consortium (a group that cares very deeply about emojis, among other things) and they have been adopted for widespread use on cell phones, tablets, email clients, and social media platforms.
Emojis now exist as a way to succinctly express everything from the ordinary and familiar ( 
smiling face; 
thumbs-up) to the surprisingly specific (
mountain cableway; 
moon viewing ceremony) to the routinely misunderstood (
not “angry” but rather “persevering face;” 
not “shooting star” but rather “dizzy”), to the criminally repurposed (
snowflake to mean cocaine; 
rocket to mean high drug potency).
The explosive growth of this alternative form of communication is raising some interesting questions for criminal attorneys and the court system as a whole. Should emojis be considered “statements,” on equal footing with written or spoken words? If they’re not statements, then what are they? Who decides what is meant by the use of a particular emoji? Do they have to be published to the jury and included in the record as images, or can they be summarized and described by words? What should practitioners do to make sure that emojis are accurately reflected in transcripts, court orders, and appellate opinions, since many court systems are text-based and do not allow for the inclusion of images?
Let’s 
about it.
Rule 803(6): Please Hold for the Next Available Representative…
A few weeks ago I participated in a seminar on digital evidence, and one of the topics we discussed was cell phone records (subscriber information, call detail records, historical location data, etc.). That’s not surprising, since the widespread use of cell phones has made these records an increasingly common and important tool in criminal cases. Location data can help prove that the defendant was in the victim’s house at the time of the murder, call logs can help prove the co-conspirators were in regular contact with each other, and so on.
What did surprise me was when I asked a group of 75+ prosecutors how often they have used an affidavit to authenticate these kinds of records and get them admitted into evidence, without the need for live testimony by a witness from the company? Only one prosecutor had ever done so, and that was in a case with a pro se defendant. There seemed to be a lot of confusion about (i) whether this was even possible, (ii) old rules vs. new rules, and (iii) state court vs. federal court, so I thought this post would be a good opportunity to help clear things up.
Confusing Recorded Recollection and Present Recollection Refreshed
I wrote a post (here) about the recorded recollection exception to the hearsay rule, in which I noted that this exception often is confused with the technique of present recollection refreshed under Evidence Rule 612. We see a little of that in the recent court of appeals decision, State v. Brown. Let’s take a look.
Evidence Rule 803(8) and the Admissibility of Police Reports
Suppose that a law enforcement officer testifies for the State in a criminal case and is unable to remember some aspects of his investigation. The prosecutor shows the officer his report, which the officer prepared in the ordinary course of his work around the time of the events, but it does not refresh his memory. The prosecutor offers the report as evidence. The defendant’s attorney objects, relying on North Carolina Rule of Evidence 803(8). That rule creates an exception to the hearsay rule for official records and reports, but it specifically excludes “in criminal cases matters observed by police officers and other law-enforcement personnel.” The prosecutor argues that notwithstanding this prohibition, the report is admissible under other hearsay exceptions. Who’s right?
Competency and the Residual Hearsay Exception
I previously wrote (here) about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent cert grant in Ohio v. Clark, a case in which the Court will decide whether a three-year-old child’s statements to his preschool teachers are testimonial. Hiding in plain sight in that case is an issue as interesting as the Crawford question that the Court will decide. In Clark, the Ohio Supreme Court held that the child’s statements to his teachers identifying the defendant as the perpetrator were testimonial. It further held that the trial court violated the defendant’s confrontation clause rights when it admitted the child’s out of court statements to his teachers at trial, after finding the child—L.P. —incompetent to testify. L.P. was found to be incompetent six months after uttering the statements at issue.
Hearsay at Probation Violation Hearings
A recent case from the Supreme Court of North Carolina appears to have relaxed the limits on the use of hearsay at a probation violation hearing. The case also sheds light on the persistent question of whether a pending criminal charge may be considered as a violation of probation. In State v. Murchison, the defendant … Read more
Hearsay Exceptions: Statements Against Penal Interest
In this, my last post in a long series on hearsay exceptions, I’ll address the Rule 804 exception for statements against penal interest. Rule 804(b)(3) creates a hearsay exception for a “statement which was at the time of its making so far contrary to the declarant’s pecuniary or proprietary interest, or so far tended to … Read more
Hearsay Exceptions: Former Testimony and Dying Declarations
Rule 804 contains five hearsay exceptions that apply when the declarant is unavailable. I addressed one of them—the residual exception—in a prior post. Another one of the five—statements of family history—rarely arises in the criminal law so I won’t spend any time on it. In this post I’ll tackle two of the Rule 804 exceptions: … Read more
Hearsay Exceptions: What Does “Unavailability” Mean?
In earlier posts I covered the major Rule 803 hearsay exceptions, for which unavailability is immaterial. Rule 804 contains additional hearsay exceptions, but they only apply when the declarant is unavailable. What does unavailability mean? The Rule specifies five circumstances when a declarant is unavailable. The sections below explore them. Privilege. A witness is unavailable … Read more