giving jury instruction on confession error when defendant’s statement, while incriminating, not inconsistent with his contention that victim’s death was accidental and not “confession”
How later courts described this case
- giving jury instruction on confession error when defendant’s statement, while incriminating, not inconsistent with his contention that victim’s death was accidental and not “confession”
- statements that indicate the declarant’s state of mind are admissible as exceptions to the hearsay rule when the declarant is unavailable to testify, there is a reasonable probability that the proffered hearsay statements are truthful, and the statements are relevant to a material issue in the case
- “[u]nder the circumstances, evidence of the statements concerning [the declarant’s] fear of harm served no purpose other than to create the inference that the defendant was guilty of murder”
- conviction reversed on this ground
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
JUSTICE UNDERWOOD, dissenting:
I am not as certain as my colleagues appear. to be that the evidence relating to the victim’s state of mind was inadmissible. (See the in-depth discussion of this question in United States v. Brown (D.C. Cir. 1973), 490 F.2d 758 .) But, even assuming the court is correct in saying that it is not admissible, that error, as well as any error in the complained-of instruction, was, in my judgment, harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. (Chapman v. California (1967), 386 U.S. 18 , 17 L. Ed. 2d 705 , 87 S. Ct. 824 ; People v. Taylor (1984), 101 Ill. 2d 508, 517 .) Given defendant’s admission that he and his wife were not sleeping together, that she had filed a divorce action, that she rebuffed his sexual advances that evening, that he held her head under water and watched the bubbles coming up, thereafter walked home without checking her condition, threw in the river the clothes he had worn that evening, and subsequently told the officers “I did it. You guys know I did it,” I cannot believe a jury would have returned a different verdict had the complained-of instruction language and the state-of-mind evidence been excluded.
I would affirm the trial court’s judgment.