Dying declaration

Evidence
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Hearsay and exceptions
in English law · in United States law Confessions · Business records Excited utterance · Dying declaration Party admission · Ancient document Declaration against interest Present sense impression · Res gestae Learned treatise · Implied assertion
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In the law of evidence, the dying declaration is testimony that would normally barred as hearsay but may nonetheless be admitted as evidence in certain kinds of cases because it constituted the last words of a dying person.

History

In medieval English courts, the principle originated of Nemo moriturus praesumitur mentiri — a dying person is not presumed to lie.^[1] An incident in which a dying declaration was admitted as evidence has been found in a 1202 case.^[2]

In the United States

Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, a dying declaration is admissible if the proponent of the statement can establish:

1. Unavailability of the declarant -- this can be established using FRE 804(a)(1)-(5);
2. The declarant’s statement is being offered in a criminal prosecution for murder, or in a civil action;
3. The declarant’s statement was made while under the belief that his death was imminent; and
4. The declarant’s statement must relate to the cause or circumstances of what he believed to be his impending death.

The declarant does not actually have to die for the statement to be admissible, but there must be a genuine belief that death was imminent and the declarant must be unavailable to testify in court. If the stipulations cannot be met, it would then constitute hearsay and not fall into the exception. As with all testimony, the dying declaration will be inadmissible unless it is based on the declarant's actual knowledge.

Furthermore, the statement must relate to the circumstances or the cause of the declarant's own death. A counterexample is the dying declaration of Clifton Chambers in 1988, in which Chambers confessed that ten years earlier, he had helped his son bury a man named Russell Bean, whom the son had killed by accident. The statement was sufficient cause to justify a warrant for a search on the son's property; Bean's body was indeed found, but there was no physical evidence of a crime after ten years, and since Chambers was not the victim, his dying declaration was not admissible as evidence, and the son was never brought to trial.^[1]

In U.S. federal courts, the dying declaration exception is limited to civil cases and criminal homicide prosecutions. Although many U.S. states copy the Federal Rules of Evidence in their statutes, some permit the admission of dying declarations in all cases.

The first use of the dying declaration exception in American law was in the 1770 murder trial of the British soldiers responsible for the Boston Massacre. One of the victims, Patrick Carr, told his doctor before he died that the soldiers had been provoked. The doctor's testimony helped defense attorney John Adams to secure acquittals for some of the defendants and reduced charges for the rest.

If the defendant is convicted of homicide but the reliability of the dying declaration is in question, there is grounds for an appeal.^[3]

The future of the dying declaration doctrine in light of Supreme Court opinions such as Crawford v. Washington (2004) is unclear (Crawford was decided under the constitution's Confrontation Clause, not the common law). Opinions such as Giles v. California (2008) discuss the matter (although the statements in Giles were not a dying declaration), but Justice Ginsberg notes in her dissent to Michigan v. Bryant (2011) that the court has not addressed whether the dying declaration exception is valid after the confrontation clause cases.

In India

Dying declarations are allowed as evidence in Indian courts if the dying person is conscious of his or her danger, he or she has given up hopes of recovery, the death of the dying person is the subject of the charge and of the dying declaration, and if the dying person was capable of a religious sense of accountability to his or her Maker.^[2]

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Last Words", Brendan I. Koerner, Legal Affairs, November/December 2002. Fetched from URL on 9 May 2011.
2. ^ ^{a b} "Dying Declaration - A Man Will Not Meet His Maker with a Lie in His Mouth", Raghvendra Singh Raghuvanshi, SSRN, February 25, 2010. In turn, this paper's reference to the 1202 date cites "M.N. Howard, "Phipson on Evidence", 15th edn., Sweet & Maxwell, 2000 at Pg. 886." Note: A number of sentences in this SSRN paper seem to be identical to the "Legal Affairs" article by Koerner, without citing Koerner. I do not know how much this impugns this source.
3. ^ Dying declaration unreliable: SC acquits two