Court Opinion

ID: 9479876
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:31:21.307946+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:20.204658
License: Public Domain

BREYER, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
In order to admit into evidence the hearsay statement of an unavailable declarant under Fed.R.Evid. 804(b)(5)’s residual hearsay exception, a court must find “circumstantial guarantees” of the statement’s “trustworthiness” that are “equivalent” to those found in the Rule’s other exceptions for (1) former testimony subject to somewhat similar cross examination, (2) a statement made under belief of impending death, (3) a statement against interest, and (4) a statement of personal or family history. Fed.R.Evid 804(b)(l-4). See 4 J. Wein-stein & M. Berger, Weinstein’s Evidence ¶ 804(b)(5)[01], at 804-173 (1988) (“[T]he courts have admitted hearsay statements pursuant to Rule 804(b)(5) when a trustworthiness within the spirit of the Rule 804 class exceptions has been demonstrated.”) [hereinafter Weinstein’s Evidence ]. Where can the court find such guarantees with respect to Ronald’s statements, made to his mother the day following his accident, that he “put the call bell on,” “waited and ... waited,” and “put the call bell on again two or three times” before he left the bed and fell?
The majority finds such a guarantee in hospital notes that Nurse Kennedy wrote, notes that say,
Found pt on floor — apparently crawled out of end of bed — trying to get to BR— had called for help but not quick enough response
These notes, however, do not indicate whether Nurse Kennedy meant the last phrase — “not quick enough response” — as evaluating the situation or as stating the obvious (that the response was not quick enough to prevent the fall), or, if the former, whether the evaluation is her own or Ronald’s. No other corroborating evidence was ever introduced; on the contrary, Nurse Call testified that she arrived in Ronald’s room “between 30 and 45 seconds” after hearing “Ron’s bell go off” and found Nurse Kennedy already there. Where in this is there any special “guarantee” of “trustworthiness” for the relevant portion of Ronald’s statement, the assertion of a significant lapse of time between his signalling for help and the nurses’ response?
There is no special “guarantee” of “trustworthiness” in the fact that Ronald is retarded. He may not have been capable of understanding how his statement (“I waited and waited”) might be used to show the hospital’s liability, but he was perfectly capable of understanding that he was not supposed to get out of bed on his own, and he would seem as capable as anyone else of exaggerating the wait to disown his own fault. Cf. United States v. York, 852 F.2d 221, 226 (7th Cir.1988) (excluding statements of fourteen year-old witness partly because he “had a motive to misrepresent the truth”); id. at 225 (“critical” factor in trustworthiness analysis is “whether the hearsay declarant had a motive to lie”) (internal quotation marks omitted); United States v. Fern, 778 F.2d 985, 991 (3d Cir. 1985) (same). Nor can one find a “guarantee” of “trustworthiness” in the timing of his statement, for he made it, not contemporaneous with the accident, but, rather, the next morning. Cf. United States v. Vretta, 790 F.2d 651, 659 (7th Cir.1986) (“[Cjlose proximity in time between the statement [describing the event] and the [event] itself lends support to the statement’s trustworthiness.”) And, I do not see how one can find a special “guarantee” in the fact that his mother testified that he was a very truthful person.
In fact, to permit admission of this statement simply because Nurse Kennedy’s note provides some weak, and highly controverted, corroboration is to eliminate any legal requirement of special “trustworthiness.” *423It is, in essence, to read the “residual” hearsay exception as allowing the district court to admit any hearsay for which it finds a special need. Such a reading seems wrong, see United States v. McCall, 740 F.2d 1331, 1342 (Widener, J., concurring) (where evidence of reliability is weak, “[m]ere unavailability ... is an insufficient reason to justify the admissibility of [hearsay] statements”), for it is contrary to the intent of Congress. Indeed, the House of Representatives initially voted not to permit a residual hearsay exception precisely because it feared such a result. See House Comm, on the Judiciary, Report on Federal Rules of Evidence, H.R.Rep. No. 650, 93d Cong., 1st Sess. (1973), 1974 U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 7051. The House withdrew its opposition only when the Senate narrowed the scope of the exception and instructed courts that it “intended that the residual hearsay exceptions will be used very rarely, and only in exceptional circumstances,” Senate Comm, on the Judiciary, Report on Federal Rules of Evidence, S.Rep. No. 1277, 93d Cong., 2d Sess. 18-20 (1974), 1974 U.S.Code Cong. & Admin. News 7066. The Senate Committee admonished courts applying 804(b)(5) to “exercise no less care, reflection and caution than the courts did under the common law in establishing the now-recognized exceptions to the hearsay rule.” Id. at 20, 1974 U.S. Code Cong. & Admin.News 7066. Failure by the lower court here to identify specific “guarantees” of the “trustworthiness” of Ronald’s statements suggests that the admission of these statements was not preceded by sufficient “reflection and caution.”
I can find no case admitting hearsay under circumstances like those present here. Furtado, supra, which involved a lawyer's out-of-court statement made under oath, certainly does not. Nor do United States v. Carlson, 547 F.2d 1346 (8th Cir.1976) and United States v. Murphy, 696 F.2d 282 (4th Cir.1982), the other two cases cited by appellee. Carlson and Murphy both involved grand jury testimony which, at least in the case of Murphy, was supported by “strongly corroborative testimony and proof, some of which was unimpeachable.” 696 F.2d at 286. Cases admitting hearsay under Rule 804(b)(5) involve substantially greater guarantees of reliability than those present here. See Wein-stein’s Evidence If 804(b)(5) [01], at 804-173 n. 3 (collecting cases).
I understand still less how the majority can say the admission of the statement was “harmless.” The district court admitted it because of need. Plaintiff’s counsel told the court, “I can’t create a more severe need.... It’s critical to the plaintiff’s case.” Virtually the only other evidence that plaintiff had to convince the jury that the hospital waited too long to answer Ronald’s call consisted of Nurse Kennedy’s notes. Nurse Kennedy and Nurse Call refuted the implication of those notes. Without Ronald’s testimony, the jury might well have believed the nurses.
Of course, the plaintiff also argued that the hospital’s decision not to restrain Ronald was negligent. But Nurse Call testified that Ronald “wasn’t” the “sort of patient that required restraints,” and that “there wasn’t” any reason “to restrain him” on the relevant evening. Other witnesses testified to the same effect. A juror, uncertain about whether plaintiff had proved the hospital should have used restraints, might well have turned to Ronald's statement that he “waited and waited,” and thought, “At least, if they didn’t restrain him, they should have responded quicker.” How can the court know that the jurors (or some of them) did not reason in this way? How can it say “with fair assurance” that the jury “was not substantially swayed” by Ronald’s unlawfully admitted statement? See Vincent v. Louis Marx & Co., 874 F.2d 36, 41 (1st Cir.1989) (describing test for harmless error).
Since I believe the Federal Rules of Evidence do not permit admission of Ronald’s hearsay statements and that their admission was not harmless, I must dissent.