Court Opinion

ID: 9566189
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 19:34:47.27595+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:28:24.860091
License: Public Domain

STEWART, Justice
(concurring):
I concur in the majority opinion. I write separately to emphasize one important factor that I believe a trial judge should consider in the reliability determination that must be made as to a child’s hearsay statements, as required by Utah Code Ann. § 76-5-411.
Children’s declarations concerning abuse may raise special problems of reliability. That is especially true when the adults concerned are involved in a custody dispute or for other reasons are antagonistic to each other. Accusations made by children may have such a reverberating clang as to all but drown out exculpatory evidence in the minds of jurors. For the most part, children, especially young children, do not lie, at least in the sense that gives rise to a judgment of moral culpability. However, they can misstate reality and even confuse imagination, fantasy, and ’ confabulation with reality, and sometimes not know that they have done so. Children may also perceive in a reasonably accurate way, but describe the perception in an unintentionally misleading manner. A child’s inaccurate declaration may also result from psychological processes that have the appearance of accurate recall, but in reality are not. Discrimination between factually accurate and inaccurate statements can be difficult, and sometimes impossible. One important cause of unreliability may be a child’s desire to please adults or avoid blame or guilt feelings. The willingness to give suggested answers to leading questions and thereby construct “facts” in response to a suggested scenario is not uncommon. Children — and sometimes adults — who accept such suggestions and transmute them to “facts” can “construct” a “memory” of those “facts” that becomes indistinguishable from reality in their minds.
To avert some of the threats to the fact-finding process that such difficulties pose, trial courts should require videotaping of interviews with social workers and psychologists who are regularly involved in dealing with child sex abuse issues so that a court has some way of determining whether a child’s declarations could be the product of subtle coaching or suggestion. Videotaping is a procedure that is followed in many police departments and by many psychologists, and it certainly ought to be required by agencies that deal regularly with victims of child abuse. That is virtually the only way of determining whether a professional interviewer has in some way elicited unreliable evidence. See generally State v. Bullock, 791 P.2d 155, 161 (Utah 1989) (Stewart, J., dissenting). I realize *1056that sometimes it will not be possible or realistic to require videotaping, but when it can be done, it ought to be done. If the interview is not videotaped, that ought to be given significant weight in the reliability determination, especially when those declarations are crucial to a determination of guilt.