Word: hearsay
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...result, the committee has become increasingly powerful and immune to such ordinary sanctions as judicial review. The admission of hearsay evidence, the lack of a separate panel to handle appeals, the use of explicitly political questioning; each of these violations of common legal practice is regularly committed by the CRR, making a mockery of its pretensions to the role of an impartial judicial committee. For these reasons, the CRR as presently constituted can no longer he allowed to operate...
...reinforce this guilt by association, the prosecutor has wide latitude to introduce hearsay evidence, including defendants' statements, so long as they support the conspiracy theory. To compound a jury's confusion, once a conspiracy has been established, any defendant is equally culpable for the acts of the others. So complex are the legal rules that the judge himself may unwittingly tip the scales against individual defendants when he charges the jury and tells it how difficult conspiracy is to prove and how secretive conspirators tend to be. The net effect, says Dean Abraham Goldstein of the Yale...
...case came from Georgia and involved the fate of the hearsay rule in state trials. In general, that rule excludes statements made out of court. But the rule has many exceptions and qualifications. Georgia law, for example, sanctions hearsay evidence obtained from a conspirator against his co-conspirators in most circumstances. Many lawyers argue that this violates the defendants' Sixth Amendment right to confront the witnesses against them...
...their heads. At Evans' trial, a Georgia prisoner testified that he had heard one of the murder defendants say: "If it hadn't been for that dirty son of a bitch Alex Evans, we wouldn't be in this now." The trial judge admitted this hearsay evidence, even though Evans had no chance to cross-examine the man who was supposed to have made the remark...
Crucial Fifth. Justice John Harlan did not agree that the evidence was "peripheral," but he did concur in upholding the conviction. He argued that exceptions to the hearsay rule should not be weighed against the Sixth Amendment confrontation right at all. Instead, he gave priority to the due process clauses of the Fifth and 14th amendments, which, he says, ask whether or not the contested evidence compromised a fair trial. In Evans, he concluded that...