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Virtual Cross-Examination: The Art Of Impeaching Hearsay, John G. Douglass
Virtual Cross-Examination: The Art Of Impeaching Hearsay, John G. Douglass
Law Faculty Publications
Trial lawyers and judges are quite accustomed to courtroom battles over the admissibility of hearsay. But relatively few have much experience at challenging the credibility of hearsay. Once hearsay is admitted in evidence, even the ablest advocates typically proceed as if the hearsay battle were over, at least until the appeal. Few lawyers take advantage of the opportunities available to impeach the hearsay declarant. Consider the perspective of one experienced trial judge: I sometimes wonder at what seems to me the passing up of golden opportunities by the able advocate. Foremost among these lost opportunities is the virtual total neglect …
Admissibility As Cause And Effect: Considering Affirmative Rights Under The Confrontation Clause, John G. Douglass
Admissibility As Cause And Effect: Considering Affirmative Rights Under The Confrontation Clause, John G. Douglass
Law Faculty Publications
In this essay, I first examine some of the strategic choices spawned by the Supreme Court's "microscopic" focus on reliability in confrontation-hearsay cases. Rather than promoting the value at the core of the Confrontation Clause-the adversarial testing of prosecution evidence-the Court's approach leads to choices that ignore that value. While the Court scrutinizes hearsay under the microscope of reliability, it leaves the parties free to ignore and even to avoid available opportunities for effective confrontation of the hearsay declarant. At the same time, the Court's constitutional definition of reliability-which it equates with "firmly rooted" hearsay exceptions -has encouraged prosecutors to …
Minimizing The Jury Over-Valuation Concern (Visions Of Rationality In Evidence Law Symposium), Richard D. Friedman
Minimizing The Jury Over-Valuation Concern (Visions Of Rationality In Evidence Law Symposium), Richard D. Friedman
Articles
A great deal of the rhetoric of evidence discourse concerns the supposed cognitive inadequacies of the jury. In various contexts we are told that although an item of evidence is probative, it must be excluded because the jury will give it too much weight. I believe this approach has played far too great a role in evidentiary law, and that it is an interesting project to see whether we can construct a satisfactory body of law without relying at all on the cognitive inadequacy argument. I think that, at least to a large extent, we can. In some settings, where …