Evidence Commons^™

Forfeiture By Wrongdoing And Those Who Acquiesce In Witness Intimidation: A Reach Exceeding Its Grasp And Other Problems With Federal Rule Of Evidence 804(B)(6), James F. Flanagan

Faculty Publications

This article is the first comprehensive and critical analysis of the new exception to the hearsay rule that permits prosecutors to admit hearsay statements of absent witnesses when the defendant causes their unavailability at trial. The article develops the problems with the rule's overbroad language, its potential to admit unreliable hearsay and its relationship to the Confrontation Clause. These issues are of increasing interest to lawyers, judges and justices now that it is a federal rule and been adopted by ten states.

The first section is a comprehensive statement of the rule as now applied. The exception is traced from …

Reliability And The Admissibility Of Experts, Dale A. Nance

Faculty Publications

Modern law on expert testimony insists, as a condition of admissibility, that the asserted expertise be determined by the trial judge to be reliable. Reliability is usually characterized as a dichotomous attribute of evidence, as if expertise were either reliable or unreliable. This article argues that making progress in the development of meaningful and appropriate restrictions on the admissibility of expert testimony requires that we abandon this conceptualization and understand the implications of endorsing a gradational notion of reliability in which evidence can be more or less reliable and in which a comparative assessment of reliability is prominent. Consistent with …