Court Opinion

ID: 9468118
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:05:20.021861+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:41.841130
License: Public Domain

*53LEVIN H. CAMPBELL, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I agree with the court that under Rule 803(8) the performance data would not be excludable on hearsay grounds. However, I believe the court fails to give adequate attention to the fact that the trial judge excluded the data not on hearsay grounds but for lack of relevance, and that appellant never correctly stated the purpose for which the evidence was being offered. Before a party may claim error on appeal in the exclusion of evidence, he must have told the court not only what he intended to prove but for what purpose. McCormack, Evidence § 51, at 110-11 (2d ed. 1972), and cases at n.12, and 1978 Supp. at 16, n.12; see also Weinstein’s Evidence § 103[03], at 103 — 27, and cases at n.3; I Wigmore, Evidence § 17, at 319-20 and 1980 Supp., cases at p. 97-98; Fed.R.Evid. 103(a)(2); Fed.R. Civ.P. 46. This rule serves important ends. Backlogged courts should not be required to repeat trials (especially civil trials) because the trial judge has excluded evidence for lack of a clear understanding of the proponent’s purpose in offering it. Here, plaintiffs’ counsel never explained, as he could easily have done, that his purpose was not to show stopping distance at 60 m. p. h. as such, but rather to give rise to the inference, based on a disputed skid mark, that the car was speeding. It seems clear from the judge’s remarks that she did not understand that the evidence was being offered for the latter purpose. The document was thereupon excluded for lack of relevance (the hearsay issue was never reached). All this occurred at the end of a week long trial, in a context where the judge could reasonably have felt that matters were being unduly prolonged.
This court skirts the issue in footnote 1. It says that “read in retrospect,” the colloquy between court and counsel “reveals that appellant was referring, none too succinctly, to use of the report as an indirect means of calculating the Mercedes’ speed ’prior to the braking.” For this reason, “we cannot say . . . that the point as to relevance was not sufficiently made.” The rule, however, is not served by looking at the record retrospectively. The reason a party must communicate the purpose for offering evidence is to put the trial judge on notice while there is still time to save the situation. A trial judge is only human; he may not have perfect recall of earlier testimony; it is counsel’s duty, not the court’s, to articulate the purpose for which evidence is being offered. Nowhere in this record did counsel say something like, “Judge, I am offering this because we earlier had evidence of 160 foot skid marks and this exhibit will show that if it took the car 160 feet to stop, it must have been going faster than 60 m. p. h.” Had this been stated, a different ruling might have been rendered.
To be sure, this court may not mean that counsel here actually stated the purpose for the evidence, but only that the purpose was so obvious that counsel was excused from stating it. See McCormack, Evidence § 51, at 111. Defendant’s speed was already in issue, and the judge arguably should have realized how the performance data report, taken with the other evidence, would relate to the question of speed. But I do not think the indirect relationship between speed and skid marks was so obvious that counsel was excused from stating it. It was clear from the judge’s comments that she was laboring under the misimpression that the evidence was being offered merely to show when the brakes had been applied. If the point was that obvious, one would have expected the judge to perceive it; the whole object of the rule is to require counsel to articulate the purpose when the judge, is likely otherwise to misunderstand. At the end of the colloquy, counsel stated his intention to prove that the Mercedes going 60 m. p. h. could stop in 160 feet; but that was to state matters backwards. He never once stated the data was offered for the purpose of showing that the 160 foot skid marks meant the Mercedes was going faster than 60.
*54If I saw evidence of injustice, I might be more tempted to stretch the rule, but I see no such evidence here. Plaintiffs presented their own driver, who testified that the defendant was going 70 m. p. h. or more, as well as the state trooper who testified to his opinion, based on the skid marks, that defendant was going faster than 50 — so the excluded evidence would not have established a new point that was not otherwise made. To be sure, the performance data might have corroborated these witnesses, if the jury believed the skid marks came from the Mercedes, which was put in doubt by one of the plaintiffs’ own witnesses as well as by defendant’s expert. Even so, the test data was refutable by arguments that it applied only to new, mechanically perfect cars driven by professional drivers who did not lock the wheels and skid. (The tests were expressly said to have been conducted without locked wheels; thus for all we know the stopping distances were quite different from those of a skidding car.) If it could conceivably have tipped the scales in a close case, this case does not seem to have been close — the jury was out for only an hour. I think that plaintiffs had their day in court, before a jury and a judge who was fair. I do not think plaintiffs should receive a second trial.