Hearsay Objection In Court

Summary

Business Records Exception

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After an applicant for a professor’s position at a university was rejected, her friend, a tenured professor at the university, immediately wrote a letter to the dean, which accurately recounted, yet criticized, the way in which the university had handled the applicant’s application. Thereafter, the applicant sued the university for discrimination. At trial, the applicant sought to introduce the friend’s letter to the dean as evidence under the business-records exception to the rule against hearsay. The university objected on the ground that the letter did not satisfy the business-records exception. Assuming that the jurisdiction’s evidentiary rules are identical to the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE), how should the judge rule on the university’s objection?
The judge should rule in favor of the university's objection. Under the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE), the business-records exception to the hearsay rule (Rule *(*)) requires that the record be made at or near the time by—or from information transmitted by—someone with knowledge, kept in the course of a regularly conducted business activity, and that making the record was a regular practice of that activity.
The letter from the tenured professor to the dean criticizing the handling of the applicant's application does not meet these criteria because:
- It was not made as part of a regular business practice.
- It was not created at or near the time of the event in the regular course of business.
- It was a one-time, unsolicited communication, not a systematic, routine record-keeping activity.
Therefore, the letter does not qualify under the business-records exception, and the objection should be sustained.
A defendant was charged with homicide for alleging killing a rival drug dealer. The government charged a second defendant only with conspiring with the murderer to dispose of the victim’s body to conceal the crime, but not with the underlying murder itself. At the murderer’s trial, the government sought to introduce testimony from a hardware-store employee that on the day of the alleged murder, the second defendant had gone to the store and asked the employee about renting a wood chipper for the day to “get rid of some stuff right away.” Assuming that the jurisdiction’s evidentiary rules are identical to the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE), under what conditions, if any, should the court admit the second defendant’s statement to the hardware store employee?
Under the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE), the court may admit the second defendant’s statement to the hardware store employee under the following conditions:
*. Relevance (FRE *): The statement must be relevant to the case, meaning it makes a fact more or less probable.
*. Hearsay Exception (FRE *(d)(*)(E)): The statement can be considered non-hearsay if it is offered against the second defendant and was made by a co-conspirator during and in furtherance of the conspiracy.
*. Probative Value vs. Prejudice (FRE *): The probative value of the evidence should not be substantially outweighed by the potential for unfair prejudice.
If these conditions are met, the court may admit the statement. Would you like more detailed information on any of these conditions?