Background
Arthur Larry Smith was accused of killing Aritha Monalisa King. It was believed they had both traveled from Detroit to London, Ontario. While in Canada, Smith had asked King to smuggle drugs back for him. She refused and was killed by Smith. At trial, King's mother testified she received four phone calls from her daughter the night of her death. The last call came from near where her body was found. King had told her mother she would be home very soon.
The issue before the Supreme Court was whether the statements could be admissible as evidence. The trial judge admitted the evidence and Smith was convicted. On appeal, the Court of Appeal for Ontario ordered a new trial.
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Steven Murray Truscott is a Canadian man who was sentenced to death in 1959 for the rape and murder of classmate Lynne Harper. Truscott had been the last person to see her alive. He was scheduled to be hanged; however, the federal cabinet reprieved him and he was sentenced to life in prison and released on parole in 1969. Five decades later, in 2007, his conviction was overturned on the basis that key forensic evidence was weaker than had been portrayed at trial.
Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), is a United States Supreme Court decision that reformulated the standard for determining when the admission of hearsay statements in criminal cases is permitted under the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment. The Court held that cross-examination is required to admit prior testimonial statements
of witnesses who have since become unavailable.
Subramaniam v Public Prosecutor [1956] W.L.R. 965 is a leading Privy Council case that created an exception for the hearsay rule. It was a case heard on appeal from the Supreme Court of the Federation of Malaya.
The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right…to be confronted with the witnesses against him." Generally, the right is to have a face-to-face confrontation with witnesses who are offering testimonial evidence against the accused in the form of cross-examination during a trial. The Fourteenth Amendment makes the right to confrontation applicable to the states and not just the federal government. The right only applies to criminal prosecutions, not civil cases or other proceedings.
R v B (KG), [1993] 1 SCR 740, popularly known as the KGB case, is a leading Supreme Court of Canada decision on the admissibility of prior inconsistent statements as proof of the truth of their contents. Prior to this case, prior inconsistent statements made by a witness other than an accused could merely be used to impeach the witness's credibility, not for substantive purposes. Here, the Court held that if the statements could be found to be both necessary and reliable then the statements could be admitted as an exception to the hearsay rule.
R v Mohan 1994 CanLII 80, [1994] 2 SCR 9 is a leading Supreme Court of Canada decision on the use of expert witnesses in trial testimony.
The hearsay provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 reformed the common law relating to the admissibility of hearsay evidence in criminal proceedings begun on or after 4 April 2005.
Davis v. Washington, 547 U.S. 813 (2006), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States holding that hearsay statements made in a 911 call asking for aid were not "testimonial" in nature and thus their introduction at trial did not violate the Confrontation Clause as defined in Crawford v. Washington.
In the law of evidence, a 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.
Charles Randal Smith is a disgraced former Canadian pathologist who was the head pediatric forensic pathologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario, from 1982 to 2003. The quality of his autopsies, and the resulting criminal charges and convictions of thirteen people, have been called into question and a full public inquiry was ordered. The inquiry found there to be fundamental errors made on the part of Smith and many of the cases in which he had testified are now being re-examined and appealed.
Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56 (1980), is a United States Supreme Court decision dealing with the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. 305 (2009), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that it was a violation of the Sixth Amendment right of confrontation for a prosecutor to submit a chemical drug test report without the testimony of the person who performed the test. While the court ruled that the then-common practice of submitting these reports without testimony was unconstitutional, it also held that so called "notice-and-demand" statutes are constitutional. A state would not violate the Constitution through a "notice-and-demand" statute by both putting the defendant on notice that the prosecution would submit a chemical drug test report without the testimony of the scientist and also giving the defendant sufficient time to raise an objection.
Tome v. United States, 513 U.S. 150 (1995), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that held that under Federal Rules of Evidence Rule 801(d)(1)(B), a prior consistent statement is not hearsay only if the statement was made before the motive to fabricate arose.
R v Horncastle & Others [2009] UKSC 14 was a decision of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom regarding hearsay evidence and the compatibility of UK hearsay law with the right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The case represents another stage in the judicial dialogue between the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the higher courts of the United Kingdom about whether it is acceptable to base convictions "solely or to a decisive extent" on evidence made by a witness who is identified but does not appear in court.
R v Henry [2005] 3 S.C.R. 609 is a leading Supreme Court of Canada case on the protection against self-incrimination in section 13 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court ruled that s. 13 does not protect an accused who chooses to testify at a retrial from having his or her previously volunteered testimony used against him or her. The court further held that no distinction should be drawn between the use of such evidence to incriminate the accused directly or to impeach his or her credibility, but it subsequently partially restored this distinction in R. v. Nedelcu, 2012 SCC 59.
Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U.S. 284 (1973), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a state may not enforce its rules of evidence, such as rules excluding hearsay, in a fashion that disallows a criminal defendant from presenting reliable exculpatory evidence and thus denies the defendant a fair trial.
R v Baker [1989] 1 NZLR 738 was a decision of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand concerning the admissibility of hearsay evidence in a criminal trial. The judgment of President Sir Robin Cooke's created a common law exception to the rule against hearsay evidence in situations where the evidence is reliable and the witness unavailable. This principle was incorporated into the codification of the hearsay rule in the Evidence Act 2006.
