Nevada Supreme Court Reverses Murder Convictions Over Hearsay Evidence Issues

4.2.12 WC: 191694 The prosecution responded that the only reason he wasn’t in court was because my client had murdered him. Our argument, they claimed, paralleled the classic definition of “Chutzpah”: the young man who murders his parents and then demands mercy from the court on the ground that he is an orphan. But the conclusions that Murphy had, in fact, murdered Binion, of course, begged the question to be decided by the jury: did Murphy, in fact, murder him? Although hearsay statements—that is, in-court testimony by one person as to out-of-court statements made by another person—are generally not admitted at trial, there are numerous exceptions to this rule of exclusion. One of them is the “chutzpah” exception: a defendant can’t kill a witness and then seek to exclude testimony about what he would have said if he were alive. This exception has been created by the courts to discourage defendants from murdering witnesses. But to invoke that exception, it has to be clear that the defendant did, in fact, kill the witness. The prosecution could not meet that burden in this case without a full trial in which it relied on the very statement at issue. Another exception relates to “deathbed” confessions—statements made by a man who knows he’s dying and speaks in anticipation of his imminent death. The “science” behind this exception is the empirical assumption that no person will lie if he knows he is about to meet his maker. But this too is junk science, since there is no real evidence to support the assumption. Moreover, there was no evidence (aside from the challenged statement itself) that Binion actually anticipated death or that he was a religious man who feared meeting his maker with a recent lie on his lips. The final relevant exception is that an otherwise hearsay statement is admissible if it is relevant to the “then existing state of mind” of the dead person. For example, if Binion had told his lawyer that he was feeling depressed and was considering suicide, that statement could be heard by the jurors to help then decide whether his subsequent death was caused by suicide or some other means, such as murder. The prosecution argued that Binion’s “fear” of being murdered was evidence of his state of mind. It was also evidence that his death was not caused by suicide. The problem with this argument is that Binion’s statement was also evidence of Murphy’s allegedly murderous state of mind, and the jurors would not be able to limit its consideration of this explosive statement only to Binion’s state of mind. This was especially true since the judge had failed to give the jury what is called “limiting instruction,” namely that “you can consider the statement only to prove what Binion was thinking and not what Murphy was thinking.” Because of this serious and prejudicial error (as well as others), the Nevada Supreme Court reversed the murder convictions and ordered a new trial.” ® This is what the court ruled: “Assuming that the statement was relevant to rebut the defense theories, we conclude that the district court abused its discretion under Shults in admitting the statement without an appropriate limiting instruction. The prejudicial impact was great: the statement strongly implied Murphy killed Binion. Moreover, the relevance of the statement was equivocal, 190 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017277