Court Opinion

ID: 9637803
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 15:21:27.178484+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:00.722554
License: Public Domain

MAGRUDER, Circuit Judge
(concurring in the result).
I agree that insured’s statement of his age in his application for naturalization should have been admitted in evidence under the pedigree exception, and therefore that the judgment should be reversed. But I do not think that the hospital records can be admitted under 28 U.S.C.A. § 695 to prove the date of insured’s birth. The fact that it was in the general course of business for the hospital to record the patient’s age — as to which nobody in the hospital could have any personal knowledge — does not furnish any guarantee of trustworthiness of the entry. If the record were admitted for this purpose, in the language of Palmer v. Hoffman, 1943, 318 U.S. 109, 113, 63 S.Ct. 477, 480, 87 L.Ed. — , 144 A.L.R. 719: “We would then have a real perversion of a rule designed to facilitate the admission of records which experience has shown to be quite trustworthy.” The occurrence or event which is recorded in the hospital records is the birth of the patient, noted as having taken place seventy-five years previous. One of the qualifications of 28 U.S.C.A. § 695 is that it must be in the regular course of business to make a record of the event at the time it takes place “or within a reasonable time thereafter.” It can hardly be said that this requirement is met in the present case. Many cases have held, under this, and corresponding state statutes, that hospital records are admissible only as relating to an act, transaction, occurrence or event incident to the hospital treatment. See 144 A.L.R. 731-734.
We do not know the source of the hospital’s information as to the patient’s age. If it were shown that it was in the regular course of business for the hospital, upon admitting a patient, to ask him or a member of his family to state his age, and to record the answer in the hospital records, then such record might be admitted for the purpose of establishing that the patient, or a member of his family, had so stated his age. Then the patient’s (insured’s) statement of his age would come in under the pedigree exception as in the matter of the naturalization petition. But in such a case the court would not be admitting the hospital record as such to prove the truth of the entry as to the patient’s age.
For similar reasons I do not think that the birth certificate of the child of the insured can be introduced under 28 U.S. C.A. § 695, to prove the age of the parent, even though parents’ ages are customarily recorded in such certificate.