Opinion ID: 2022360
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Reports of the Missing Gun

Text: A police officer was allowed to testify that two days before the victim died she reported her gun missing. That gun was ultimately shown by ballistics to be the weapon that killed her. This testimony is clearly hearsay if offered to prove the victim's gun was missing. The majority concludes that this testimony was harmless error. I cannot agree that this evidence was harmless. The fact that the victim's gun, the instrument of her death, was missing may very well have been critical in the jury's rejection of Bacher's account of his wife's death as an accident. If the gun was missing, then it was possible to infer that the defendant, not the victim, brought it to the bedroom where the shooting occurred. From that conclusion the jury may have rejected defendant's story that the victim grabbed the gun, which resulted in a struggle and her accidental death. The jury knew from Mr. Shuck that the victim had Shuck's gun in her possession. Fortifying this fact with the absence of her own gun may have been enough to convince the jury to conclude that the defendant, not the victim, first displayed the gun that fired the lethal shot. I agree with the majority that the report was inadmissible under the Indiana Rules of Evidence. It is not a public record admissible under Rule 803(8), but not for the reason that it was recorded by a police officer. Although the witness was a police officer, he was not investigating anything when he received the routine report of a missing gun. Rather, he recorded it in the normal course of his duties as an unsolicited report. It is not excluded by Indiana Evidence Rule 803(8) because he was not investigating and made no finding. However, to be a public record the recording person (the officer) must also have observed the matter or recorded his activities. If the relevant fact is that the victim reported the gun missing (as opposed to that it was missing), then the public records exception would admit it. In this respect the exception under Rule 803(8) has the same substantive requirement as the business records exception under Rule 803(6) that the source of the information be a person acting in the course of a regularly conducted activity. Indiana has no residual trustworthiness test for statements of unavailable witnesses such as Federal Rule of Evidence 804(b)(5) (to be redesignated as part of new Rule 807, effective December 1, 1997 in the absence of congressional action). If we had such a provision, this report would seem to fit. However, the Indiana Rules plainly purposely withheld this wide discretion from our trial courts. The price of this vigilance against excessively unreliable evidence is the exclusion of some that is sufficiently reliable, but fits none of the existing pigeonholes. This is such a case. In light of this restriction, it was error to admit the report of the missing gun. I would reverse and remand for a new trial. DICKSON, J., concurs.