Questions tagged [rules-of-evidence]
Rules that apply to the admission of evidence in a trial.
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Can you de-identify a lawfully recorded audio-only call to lodge with the court and offer into evidence?
Bob, while providing lawful notice of call recording by beep-tone warning notification, records calls with a company that does not record calls where it ordinarily conveys information that exposes it ...
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What 2012-2015 SCOTUS decisions make "letter[s] from the grave" inadmissible into evidence?
I've read this interesting bit:
In a 2008 trial where a man was accused of poisoning his wife with antifreeze, Schroeder allowed into evidence a letter the wife wrote a neighbor accusing the husband ...
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Are there any criminal jurisdictions where burden of proof rests so entirely on prosecution that defense does not need to deal with evidence?
In criminal trial processes that I'm aware of, particularly adversarial, burden of proof is nominally with the prosecution in most circumstances, but in practice it seems to be somewhat shared - both ...
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Were the district attorney and his legal advisor legally correct in Dirty Harry about the total inadmissability of evidence?
In the first Dirty Harry movie, the titular detective Harry Callahan is in pursuit of a serial killer who already murdered several victims and is holding another victim as a hostage. He figures out ...
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Is police report inadmissible when the cop who wrote it is not available to testify?
Say a cop conducted a crime investigation, interviewed the person of interest (later charged with the crime) and wrote it all down in a report.
When the trial comes, the cop is no longer available (...
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Can law enforcement dig up endangered plants to recover evidence of a crime?
According to this meme if you bury a body underneath an endangered plant, it is then illegal for law enforcement to dig up the body. Is this true?
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Notice of uncontroverted facts in criminal trials
Section 128 of the New Zealand Evidence Act 2006:
(1) A Judge or jury may take notice of facts so known and accepted either
generally or in the locality in which the proceeding is being held
that ...
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Can an attorney refer to testimony made in preliminary hearings during their opening or closing arguments?
Can an attorney refer to testimony made in preliminary hearings during their opening or closing arguments?
For example, let's imagine that in a preliminary hearing before the trial has started, a cop ...
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cop lies about confession
There are 4 people at this house. Drugs and a gun were found. The police decides to arrest and charge the person who was closer to the gun and drugs. DNA samples taken from the gun show two different ...
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Why do courts allow attorneys to demand Yes-or-No answers to their questions? [duplicate]
Why do courts allow attorneys to demand Yes-or-No answers to their questions? I'm seeing a lot of that in the Chauvin trial.
Attorneys are prohibited from asking leading questions, and from badgering ...
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Why did the judge allow the state to present the personal side of George Floyd to the jury?
I just saw the opening statements for the George Floyd case.
At the end of the opening statement of the State, they presented a slide with several bullet points that gave personal information about ...
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In court can you ask someone for all names they go by? How would question be phrased?
In a hearing the plaintiff has reason to believe that the defendant may have some type of pseudonym or sometimes use a variations of his name (like going by his middle name and leaving out the first).
...
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Can Law Enforcement in the US use evidence acquired through an illegal act by someone else?
There are reports on the internet this morning that a group of people were able to hack Parler and download around 70tb of data from the servers before AWS ceased hosting the platform. There are ...
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Meaning of "Strike from the Record" in legal code? Is there *any* memory/record once "stricken"? By who/what handled/processed? Proof of striking?
"Strike the record" ("strike from the record", "strike that from the record") is a frequently spoken phrase in legal procedural docudramas. Are there violent connotations ...
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Does video evidence need to be attested to by a human?
If video filmed by (say) a smartphone is used as evidence, does the person who filmed it have to submit an affidavit saying "I filmed that at location X at time Y"? Or can the video be used ...
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Faked Discovery Evidence
If a victim submits fake photographs as evidence and said photographs are proven to be edited pictures, would that qualify for dismissing a case?
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Can a lawyer compel a witness to read something aloud in court?
Often on shows like Law and Order, a lawyer might ask someone on the stand to read something aloud. An example might be an academic putting forward one opinion, being asked to read an excerpt from a ...
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Can a person secure an entity's former employee to act as an expert witness against them?
In federal court, is there any ethical or evidentiary rule that prohibits a person from using that entity's former employee as an expert witness against them?
For context, I would like to use a ...
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Can a phone conversation be summoned from telecom operator as evidence in court of law
Our landlord/landlady have twice made statements that suggest they breached our privacy. We have not recorded our conversations since we understand it would be illegal to do so.
However, we wish to ...
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What are some cases / journals / books about withholding favourable evidence from the defence
I have access to westlaw and lexislibrary but cannot find any relevant cases to the police or prosecution not sharing expert evidence from the defence at all. Any help would be greatly appreciated, ...
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Can defendants switcheroo whenever they want?
Here is a 1994 article describing an Illinois criminal trial where defense counsel pulled the old switcheroo and sat a different person with him at the defense table instead of the defendant. The ...
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Does Evidence Have to be Legal in Both the State Where it is Created and Where It is Adjudicated?
Suppose Suzie in Alabama calls Bonnie in Arizona, and records the call without telling Bonnie. Alabama and Arizona are both one-party consent states, so this recording is legal.
Suppose that for some ...
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801.d.2.D - Party Opponent
For mock trial, the case is STATE OF WASHINGTON, Plaintiff, vs. SYDNEY CARDEN, Defendant.
Two of the witnesses are Sam Drucker (plaintiff witness), a manager for a local thrift store, and Kahuna ...
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What happens when there's not enough evidence in a trial?
I'm writing a story and need to know some things for factual accuracy.
There's a man in the story who is accused of a DUI hit-and-run. He's discovered (sleeping) in the vehicle after the hit and run. ...
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Is evidence obtained under false pretences admissable in a criminal trial?
Is evidence obtained under false pretences admissable in a criminal trial?
For example, imagine a policeman impersonates a computer technician to gain admittance to the suspect's home in order to "...
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When can you no longer submit evidence in a civil case?
I was wondering if there was a point in a civil case where parties are no longer allowed to submit evidence, to my understanding all evidence is submitted at a pretrial, and after that it is ...
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Is it an error for a judge to not consider all pieces of evidence?
A prosecutor attempts to lay charges against an alleged perpetrator (in New Zealand anyone can do this under the private prosecution provisions).
The judge is presented with a set of pieces of ...
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Explanatory vs Exploratory evidence in legal proceedings
In academia, there is an important distinction between exploratory analyses of data and confirmatory analyses. Careers have been ruined by researchers passing off the one as the other.
Since the ...
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How is the burden of evidence distributed between parties?
I'm curious as to how the US legal system determines who should present evidence and how much evidence is required by them to prove one side of an argument against a counterargument.
Here's an ...
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California Recording Law - Do recordings need to be used as stated?
In California, two-party consent recording law requires that consent be obtained by all parties before recording phone calls. I've pasted relevant parts of this law below.
Further, subsection (d) of ...
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"Reasonable doubt" and conditional probabilities
Let A be the event that the accused is guilty and B is the event that evidence / testimonies are presented against the accused.
In the U.S., does "reasonble doubt" refers to a juror's subjective ...
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Chain of Custody
So chain of custody is obviously important, but why?
I have seen many articles referring to drugs and one where the murder weapon was handled without gloves. But what about other types of evidence ...
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Warrants and statements under oath
If an arrest warrant is issued does that mean a statement was made under oath? If so if a part of the statement for the arrest warrant is proven false what are the implications? In the case of a ...
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Can DNA on drugs be used as evidence even if the drugs weren't in anyone's possession at the time it was found? (Canada)
Can DNA found on drugs be used as evidence in court or is that unconstitutional? DNA can be transferred from different sources so it doesn't necessarily mean the DNA holder has come in direct contact ...
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What if a guilty person is later found innocent?
Suppose someone was found guilty according to evidence, jailed, then more evidence finds him/her innocent way later (like the incriminating evidence was later found to be fabricated). Would this mean ...
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When can a defendant in a criminal trial introduce evidence?
I was watching a criminal speeding trial in Texas a few weeks ago. The defendant was acting pro se. A police dash-cam video apparently existed of the incident and the defendant was in possession of it....
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