Court Opinion

ID: 9676584
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 05:28:05.323157+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:49.604946
License: Public Domain

CLINTON, Judge,
dissenting.
Professor Ray writes: “The phrase ‘admission against interest’ ... tends to cause the courts and some writers to assume that the basis of admissions is the same as that of declarations against interest. In fact, they are quite different.” Ray, Law of Evidence (3rd Ed.) § 1122, 1A Texas Practice 271.
The opinion of the Court of Appeals says: “According to the officers’ version, Shiflet related the facts that he shot Mrs. Kaiser and hid her body ...” 653 S.W.2d 830, at 834 (my emphasis here and throughout). However, elsewhere the Court of Appeals and the majority has the appellant stating that “he was convinced that he did in fact stop Diana Kaiser with his patrol car, that he did in fact shoot Diana Kaiser, and that he did in fact place her body under the culvert where she was found,” id., at 833; majority opinion, at 626. That is the primary statement in question.
Unlike an admission, for a declaration against interest to be admissible it must be shown that the declarant has “knowledge of the facts stated,” Ray, op cit. § 1009, at 262. As I understand it, throughout appellant denied knowledge of those facts, his position being that what he stated was based on his failing to pass one or more polygraph examinations. All seem to accept his attitude. That he became “convinced” on such basis does not mean he really had “knowledge” of those facts. His declaration is of nothing more than his mental state of belief at that time. Under Texas Rules of Evidence, Rule 803(24), the statement might be admissible, but not otherwise. [Being a declaration of his mental state of belief, it is not a declaration of state of mind and is not admissible “as evidence of the truth of the external situation believed ...,” Ray, op cit. § 863, at 96; Texas Rule 803(3)].
An admission, in contrast to a declaration against interest, is a statement amounting to “a prior acknowledgment by such party that one of the facts relevant to the issues is not as he now claims,” Ray, § 1121, at 265-266; cf. Texas Rule 801(e)(2). Again, unless he did so by pleading not guilty, it *632seems to me that appellant would have to claim at trial that he was not now “convinced” by reason of having failed the polygraph examinations that he had stopped Kaiser et cetera.
In the event, as a declaration of belief it is most doubtful that the statement was admissible at all, simply because of what appellant had been “convinced” seems utterly irrelevant to any material issue in the case.
I respectfully dissent.