Opinion ID: 1794583
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: habit evidence vs. character evidence.

Text: In recommending admission of habit evidence, as opposed to character evidence, the Advisory Committee's Notes to Federal Rule of Evidence (FRE) 406 reiterated the oft-quoted paragraph from McCormick's treatise on the law of evidence: Character and habit are close akin. Character is a generalized description of one's disposition, or of one's disposition in respect to a general trait, such as honesty, temperance, or peacefulness. Habit, in modern usage, both lay and psychological, is more specific. It describes one's regular response to a repeated specific situation. If we speak of character for care, we think of the person's tendency to act prudently in all the varying situations of life, in business, family life, in handling automobiles and in walking across the street. A habit, on the other hand, is the person's regular practice of meeting a particular kind of situation with a specific type of conduct, such as the habit of going down a particular stairway two stairs at a time, or of giving the hand-signal for a left turn, or of alighting from railway cars while they are moving. The doing of habitual acts may become semi-automatic. FRE 406 Advisory Committee's Note (1972) ( quoting McCormick, Evidence § 162, at 340 [now see John W. Strong, 1 McCormick on Evidence § 195, at 584-85 (5th ed. West 1999)]). Both character evidence and habit evidence are offered as circumstantial evidence of conforming conduct. The element of habit evidence that distinguishes it from character evidence is the element of specificity, as opposed to mere disposition. Thus, evidence that Appellant is a drunkard would be character evidence, whereas evidence that he drinks one-half to three-quarters of a gallon a day of vodka is evidence of a habit. See generally 29 Am.Jur.2d, Evidence § 391 (1994). The Advisory Committee noted that  [a]greement is general that habit evidence is highly persuasive of conduct on a particular occasion.  FRE 406 Advisory Committee's Note, supra (emphasis added). Again quoting McCormick: Character may be thought of as the sum of one's habits though doubtless it is more than this. But unquestionably the uniformity of one's response to habit is far greater than the consistency with which one's conduct conforms to character or disposition. Even though character comes in only exceptionally as evidence of an act, surely any sensible man in investigating whether X did a particular act would be greatly helped in his inquiry by evidence as to whether he was in the habit of doing it. Id.