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Dying declaration


In the law of evidence, the dying declaration is testimony that would normally be barred as hearsay but may in common law nonetheless be admitted as evidence in Criminal law trials because it constituted the last words of a dying person. The rationale, accurate or not, is that someone who is dying or believes death to be imminent would have less incentive to fabricate testimony, and as such, the hearsay statement carries with it some reliability.

In medieval English courts, the principle originated of Nemo moriturus praesumitur mentiri — "no-one on the point of death should be presumed to be lying". An incident in which a dying declaration was admitted as evidence has been found in a 1202 case.

In common law, a "dying declaration" must have been a statement made by a deceased person who would otherwise have been a credible witness to their own death by murder or manslaughter, and was of "settled hopeless expectation of death".

The admissibility of hearsay evidence in criminal proceedings has been governed by the Criminal Justice Act 2003 which effectively replaced the common law regime and abolished all common law hearsay exceptions (except those preserved by s.118) including the dying declaration exception. An original statement made by a dead person may now be admissible under the statutory "unavailability" exception (ss.114 & 116) subject to the courts' judicial discretion (preserved by s.126) to exclude unrealiable evidence (i.e. the prejudicial value outweighs the probative value).

Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, a dying declaration is admissible if the proponent of the statement can establish all of the following:

Other general rules of admissibility also apply, such as the requirement that the declaration is based on the declarant's actual knowledge.

The statement must relate to the circumstances or the cause of the declarant's own impending death. For example, in the dying declaration of Clifton Chambers in 1988, he stated that ten years earlier, he had helped his son bury a man whom the son had killed by accident. The statement was sufficient cause to justify a warrant for a search on the son's property, and the man's body was indeed found. However, there was no physical evidence of a crime, and since Chambers was not the victim, his dying declaration was not admissible as evidence, and the son was never brought to trial.


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